MNR Horsemanship

10/08/2025

“I don’t always agree with you but I love what you write, anyway.”

Huh? What does this comment—and readers so often say this—even mean? Am I to feel grateful? Chastised? Am I to vow to do better? Wonder where I went wrong? Mend my ways, so that I’ll not risk losing you, forever?

I think this sentiment is probably sent in support and kindness. Yet, try as I might to take it at face value, it still makes me feel uncomfortable and misunderstood. Why? Because we're better than that!

Here’s the thing. Healthy disagreement—that is, without put-downs or name-calling—is actually good for you and me! If your opinions conflict with mine, it means that I am making you think. It means that you are not being spoon-fed information that goes down easily, that feels good without any sort of challenging thought.

It means that you and I aren’t in the icky relationship of sage-and-sycophant.

It means that I am speaking my own truth, without pandering to the acceptance of others. Teaching effectively is not some sort of popularity contest, particularly if you have reservations about the mob mentality that exists within much of current horsemanship, as I do.

I just don’t believe that everything we already know is flawed and that all we’ve yet to learn is better for our horses, as is so often being taught.

There have been—and still are—too many beautiful horse-and-rider combos to blanket all traditional horsemanship with shame.

There were far too many beautiful hunt seat equitation riders and western pleasure horses in the 1960s and '70s to swallow this whole. No matter what we currently believe when it comes to self-betterment, we can still make life hard for our horses!

Usually, what I am sharing is a lived experience, rather than a theory that supports a particular program. It can surprise people to learn that personal opinions have no bearing on someone else’s reality.

Your opinion does not change my past. We simply cannot agree, or disagree, with events that have taken place in someone else’s life. To do so is neither empathetic, nor the thought process of a grown-up.

Finally, few of us consider that it is unhealthy and self-limiting to follow only the people who will keep us comfortable by echoing our already-ingrained thoughts. That once on the band wagon, we can be asked nothing too demanding, or else we should jump off, lest the wagon run away with us.

You don’t have to agree with me but please, don’t tell me that while we don’t see eye to eye, you love me, anyway. As opposed to what? That I try to write more agreeably, so that we can be friends? No. We’re better, stronger, more elastic, more growth-minded and way more mature than this, no matter how well-intentioned the comment.

Your personal experiences and my own should not be the qualifier on whether we like and trust one another! I just don't think that love should be offered on the condition that people will always agree!

Read. Think. Feel. Ride.

Then, do or don’t. We can still be friends.

10/07/2025

10/07/2025

I get asked a lot these days about the price of horses, and whether I think it is going to stay up. My answer is always a hopeful; "Well, I sure hope so! It's about damned time."

The guys (and gals) out there making good horses need to be getting paid for their work. They need recognition in a form that pays the bills and puts food on the table.

Ya'll have heard the saying...

"Show me the money!"

That is where I am at now, at this stage of my career. I want...no, I demand...monetary recognition for my long days, first rides, wet saddle blankets, critters roped, gentle ground manners taught. I need fair compensation for farrier work, dental work, supplements, salt and minerals, deworming...staying up late and getting up early, all while putting the effort into developing the equine partner I dreamt about when I first spotted that young horse for sale as a weanling or yearling. I gave hard earned money to own him, I put real effort into developing him, now I deserve a pat on the back with a plump wallet.

We all do. Us honest horse traders.

There are more of us out there than you think, swimming in the pool among the parasites. It's just sometimes hard to tell the difference. Believe me when I say I get it. I buy horses too, not just sell, so I know all the ins and outs of this business. I've heard the bu****it.

This business attracts the underachievers, it always has, but now with the twenty thousand dollar price tags on decent horses being bandied about, these underachievers are truly rooting around in the bottom of the barrel. Something for nothing has always been their thing and will continue to be so.

It's tough to separate the wheat from the chaff, but if you are buying just keep your eyes open, pretty soon the work being put in will start doing the separating for you. I know for a fact that there are a lot of handy horsemen out there putting in solid days on future sale horses.

Have a good day folks. 😊

10/07/2025

Consider this: If you wouldn't feed your horse a supplement with a 10:1 calcium to phosphorus ratio, why feed beet pulp? If you're concerned about chemical exposure, why choose a feed ingredient that undergoes extensive chemical processing? If you're trying to support your horse's metabolic health,....

10/06/2025

Carole Hardin Ebert yes!

Hunters were designed to mimic the challenges of the hunt field, testing style, brilliance, and natural ability. But according to Geoff Case, USEF R Judge, trainer, and clinician, today’s hunter ring has strayed far from those origins.

“Every time you change something and it makes something more difficult, it makes it harder for the horses to go around like that,” he said. “I feel like the hunters were creating dressage with jumps in the way. Essentially it’s the same eight-jump pattern everywhere you go.”

The result? A discipline that increasingly looks like performance art, polished, robotic, and predictable, rather than a sport designed to test horse and rider.

Case believes hunters have become overly rigid in penalizing anything that deviates from a narrow picture of perfection. Cross-cantering, missed lead changes, even headshaking are all faults that weigh heavily on a score. “It was supposed to mimic the hunt field,” he noted. “And now it’s something else entirely.”

That rigidity discourages brilliance. Horses are worked until they are flat and expressionless, their personality stripped away to avoid deductions. “To be crisp and jump their best, they need to be a bit fresh,” Case explained. “But we’ve worked the brilliance out of them. You take the personality out.”

The mindset around mistakes is also harsher in hunters than in other disciplines. Piper Klemm observed that hunter riders can be “debilitated by their 76,” while jumpers with a rail down might be frustrated but move on. Case agreed, adding: “You pop chip in the hunter ring and it’s like your life is over. You want to crawl in a hole. You pop chip in the jumper ring and, if the horse leaves it up, you laugh about it and show the video to your friends.”

That difference in culture drives a wedge between hunters and other disciplines. For perfectionists drawn to the hunter ring, small imperfections feel catastrophic, while jumper riders are often able to shrug off a mistake.

In Case’s words, hunters today have become “performance art more than a sport.” The pursuit of an idealized picture, a horse going perfectly quiet, in perfect rhythm, without the slightest bobble, has overtaken the original goal of showcasing athleticism in a natural way.

Even efforts to inject brilliance have fallen flat. When international hunter derbies were introduced, horses were supposed to be allowed to be expressive and a little fresh. But in practice, the judging didn’t change. “They were supposed to be allowed to play a little bit,” Case said. “But the way those things were judged changed very little, and that was still penalized. So people went back to the same old way.”

📎 Continue reading this article at https://www.theplaidhorse.com/2025/10/01/art-or-sport-has-hunters-drifted-away-from-its-roots/
📸 © Lauren Mauldin / The Plaid Horse

10/05/2025

There are not many horses that make me feel small! Sweet Sharkey is a big boy🦈

10/05/2025

10/05/2025

There are many aids to use for the same thing, many schools of thought of how to accomplish a movement or result:
high hands or low hands, inside leg back or outside leg forward for a turn. Moving the hindquarters or shoulders always in front of the hips. Reducing tension by way of jaw flexions or drive the hind leg forward - and so on.

Which one is right?

When we follow a school or a tradition, we need to have a clear picture of the result it takes us to. Who is it for? What type of rider and what breed of horse? And what is the function of the progression?

Different aids have different functions, but beyond that they are designed to produce different outcomes: obedience only, or a biomechanical function, and within biomechanical functions there are different schools of thought of not just how the horse should move but how they should FEEL.

For example, if you’re training a cow horse, you need a very different function than a dressage show horse, and so the aids will produce different feelings and be applied in a very different way.

And you need to understand what styles blend together and not. Many people mistakenly cherry pick pieces and parts of opposing systems and try to mash them together, when parts of the training progression are in direct opposition of others. Very gifted horsemen have blended styles, but after having an above average understanding of their purpose and result. When you learn the rules of art, you can break them.

So when seeking a set of aids to follow, or a methodology to follow, consider its history, its purpose, and who it was intended for. If you don’t know this, it’s well worth a trip down research lane to get a solid understanding before confusing the horse with mishmashed aids that aren’t congruent with a desired goal.

What do you want to the horse to do? Where is going to lead? And how do you want the horse to feel?

You should have a clear picture of this in every turn, corner, circle, transition, and so on.

10/05/2025

10/05/2025

Sometimes a horse gets man-sour. Give them air: long trot outside, a different job, a lighter day. Protect the try and you’ll keep the horse.

www.AlDunning.com