Natural Horsemanship: Lessons for Dressage
Sandra Dias da Cunha is both a western rider and “natural horsemanship” teacher at the Costa do Estoril Equestrian Center. In the last five years she devoted to the study and practice of natural horsemanship, first following the teachings of Monty Roberts and currently under the guidance of Norbert Gleissner. One of the biggest challenges she met in this subject was overcoming the fears of her own dressage mare Pretty Woman. A very successful sports horse that achieved very good marks on the national and international competition, with the junior rider Inês Mano Pires. In this article Sandra shares with us an overview on the techniques and steps she followed in order to solve some of Pretty Woman’s fears using typical natural horsemanship procedures.
by: Sandra Dias da Cunha with photos by Bruno Barata | Clique aqui para ler o artigo em português
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When I dragged my business partner to a Monty Roberts demonstration, I really needed to drag her. She hadn’t come all the way to Germany just to see a horse whisperer, but at the end of the demonstration, she had to admit that “there is something to this.” That was five years ago. Since then, I have invested a lot of time in learning about Natural Horsemanship, while my business partner, Michele Cristovao, was busy building one of the best young dressage teams of Portugal. For some time, I felt that we were evolving into different directions and that my obsession in finding an alternative way might actually be the end of our partnership. Looking back, I can see how quite the opposite happened – Michele was open-minded enough to see that even for a dressage professional, there are things to be learned from Natural Horsemanship. So over time, we developed a harmonious partnership of dressage and Natural Horsemanship.
For some, Natural Horsemanship is the road to the holy grail, for others it’s just complete garbage. In my opinion, these diverging opinions have to do with the enormous diversity of professionals who claim to be practicing Natural Horsemanship, a label, which is actually not very clear. After all, if we really want to be “natural” with our horses, we would let them live in freedom and peace without ever riding them for example. But that’s not what we want, right? This is not a matter of black and white, but of shades of grey. Each one of us has to decide based on his or her ambitions and emotions, where he or she wants to be on this scale which ranges from total freedom to total slavery of the horse.
It was always obvious to me that if you want to compete with your horse, in whatever discipline, you will always have less “natural” tendencies than a pure leisure rider can have. But this does not mean that competition riders cannot benefit from learning some Natural Horsemanship techniques, which will help improve their horses’ lives and may even improve competition performance.
In this articles, I would like to talk about how we used some of these techniques on a dressage competition horse, Pretty woman. This mare, at home better known as Pommes, was always a beautiful animal, with great potential for dressage, and something, well, special. They say that reddish mares tend to be psychologically unstable and Franscisco Cancela Abreu once told me that obviously, a mare who barely touches the ground when she trots can hardly have her feet firmly planted on the ground. That might make sense, but her behaviour sure made competition life difficult!
When everything went well, Pommes had great competition results, but when things went badly, and that was a large part of the time, the mare was disqualified. Either she jumped out of the dressage arena because she didn’t like the music, or she reared up because she didn’t want to go any closer to the judge’s stand or she was disqualified for any number of other reasons. Always because she became a nervous wreck for some reason and rarely showed her true worth.
We began to confront her fears one by one using the techniques I had learned in an introductory course I took from Anna Kerchhoff de Sacchi, a Monty Roberts instructor, who at the time lived in Portugal and from books and videos I have read and watched since. First, we used habituation to get rid of her fear response to music. The mare got to have her very own iPod with little speakers installed in her box. For some time, she listened to music all day, until we moved on to the second phase, where she listened to a variety of different sounds, ranging from the bark of a dog to the roar of a electric saw. A multitude of different sounds were continuously played in random order. At first, she was frequently startled by some of the sounds, but over time habituation set in ad she learned to live with the funny noises, just as she had learned to live with the music.
In a second phase, we confronted her fear of applause, which always caused serious problems during the round of honor. We used desensibilization, which is not an easy technique to use, because it goes against our own instincts. In short, we have to continue to provide the frightening stimulus as long as the horse shows anxiety. When the horse calms down, we remove the stimulus. In the case of applause, the method was quite funny: we asked a group of kids to sit in the corner of the riding arena and asked them to applaud according to the mares reaction. They were only allowed to stop clapping their hands when the mare calmed down. This technique produces really fast results and really, within a half an hour, Pommes could take the applause with grace.
After applause, we used desensibilization to take away some of her more common fears: plastic bags, puddles of water and umbrellas. Every time a horse learns to conquer a specific fear, it also learns a bigger lesson: that it can stand fear and lose it. With time, Pommes reacted more calmly when confronted with a new scary object. Since that time, she has never again been disqualified from a competition. She still reacts when a piece of paper flies into the arena, but she doesn’t panic. She has competed at Juniors level for two years now, achieving good results and winning the bronze medal in the Portuguese Championship of 2009 and the fifth place in the 2010 Championship.
