Caledonia
Well-Known Member
Well, this comes back to my other question about the brief given to the trainer. If she was asked to school him on from where he was, then I think she's made a lot of progress in terms of both re-educating his mouth and getting his body working forward comfortably.It's early days, the first video was posted on Sunday.
It would be re-breaking to my mind, to start again from scratch with no contact to the bit, and then build up to it again. It looks (so far) that he is learning well enough with the methods she is using. There's more than one way to skin a cat, & all that.
I guess that's the intrinsic disagreement then - I don't believe in carrying on from crappy foundations, I believe that you have to take steps back to undo damage to give a basis to proceed from.
Sorry to be so dogmatic, but this is a huge bugbear of mine, as the horse responds to simple commands and it's much easier for him to regress for a few sessions to rebuild for the future. I'd hope that any decent rider/trainer would be easily able to explain to an owner why they need to drop back a bit.
After all, if it was a 1m40 horse that had lost confidence, you wouldn't keep firing at 1m40 courses, you'd drop way back down to rebuild confidence.
It's exactly the same on the flat, the horse needs confidence to be able to improve and grow in his work. Without that, learning every new movement will be unnecessarily difficult and stressful, and ultimately poor or forced in execution.
Diplomacy is not my forte when I feel strongly about something - sorry!