Horses are such beautiful animals,
and when properly trained, they are perfect for riding. Yet have an
engineer look at their back and he will tell you that for the purpose
of carrying weight, their design is rather poor. Look at other beasts
of burden and you will find that all have backs that curve up not
down like the horse‘s. Manmade structures, like bridges or flatbed
trailers, show the same upward curve. Such a back would be uncomfortable
to sit on in any gait but the walk. So in order to make the back of
the horse elastic but also strong, God needed to make it in itself
weak and strengthen it through a support system of levers, pulleys
and ropes. The second purpose was, of course, to make us pay for Adam’s
inability to resist the charm of a woman who lured him into biting
into the forbidden apple. And so, only by the sweat of our brow is
it possible for us to change the horse into the beautiful, obedient
and comfortable means of transportation. However, God is merciful
and has allowed Angels to come down from heaven to work with the horses
and teach his people how to ride these now perfectly trained animals.
And he called these Angels, “Trainers.“
What makes it so difficult to train
horses is the fact that by putting our weight on their back, we not
only change their balance but at the same time we ask them to move
in a way that is against their natural inclination. At first it is
simply highly awkward for them to carry the extra weight. Bending
in their bodies causes their hind legs to have to accept more weight,
and that takes strength and effort while it would be so easy to just
lay it on the forehand. Listen for a moment to your horse‘s thoughts:
“Leaning through a turn is half the trouble of bending through a turn,
everybody knows that. Does she really believe she knows better than
I how a horse should move? I am the horse!“ One can imagine that this
kind of thinking is happening in a horse’s head and should, therefore,
not be surprised that it resists the training. As a matter of fact,
I am convinced that the horse begins to train the rider as soon as
it has recovered from the first shock of being mounted. Beware rider!
Here is a short description of what
a horse’s day looked like for the first three years of its life. It
spent most of its time just standing or walking while eating. Every
now and then it jogged up to another horse to threaten it just to
make sure that this horse remembered who the boss is, or it would
tuck its tail and move off at a trot in response to such a threat.
And without any apparent reason it burst into a high speed gallop,
twists and turns, breaks into a prancing trot only to buck up the
field again, with every jump creating its own music and then, just
as suddenly as it started, it stops and the head goes down for another
bite of grass. This whole process took about one minute. Not much
exercise there, and that is why the horse is not fit when we start
to work it. Thank God! Yet God gave it the potential to become powerful
enough to have little trouble showing the same beautiful movements
under the rider over a long period of time, totally relaxed, that
it displayed at liberty for a brief moment of excitement, to paraphrase
Gustaf Steinbrecht. It is my hope to explain in a logical fashion
the features of the horse that allow us to turn the initially weak
and rigid animal into the powerful and supple creature we ride. Normally
we start at the back of the horse because that is where the engine
is located. I would like to start with the head and neck because in
the very beginning of the horse’s training they play the more important
role. To convince the horse to stretch its neck forward-downward is
the condition without
