My apology to Western Equitation and the evils of Rollkur

Lifted from "The Mugwump Chronicles" a Word Press blog.

Before I begin this rant, let me relate something I learned from one of my massage clients.

A woman owned a very lovely Arabian stallion. She’d bred and raised him. He was a complete gentleman. She could hand breed him or let him out with his mares. She could lead him past a mare in raging heat without him turning a head or a hair.

He was gentle as a lamb, beautifully bred, well conformed, and perfectly trained.

He could not win in the show ring. 

Why?

Well…then..as now…judges didn’t want to see a gentle, quiet, gentleman of an Arabian stallion. They wanted to see a hyped up psycho on a lead, racing into the show ring on hind legs, eyes bulging, nostrils wide, screaming his head off, dragging his handler by the lead rope. They wanted to see flash and insanity, not a well-trained, quiet horse. A horse galloping, spinning, kicking, bucking was far more entertaining than a quiet stallion you could reliably put a toddler on. 

The tales of an Arabian stallion (or any gender) being artificially jazzed up  before ever entering the show ring…with drugs, whippings, insertion of foreign objects into its anus…are not apocryphal, or even anecdotal. They are true. It’s all to win a piece of fabric. 

The owner was excused from a show ring on more than one occasion because her stallion wasn’t insane. She was accused on more than one occasion of ‘sedating’ him. WHY sedate a quiet horse? She retired him from showing because she was disgusted with the expectations of a registry more impressed with insanity than horse training. 

To continue:

There are times when I have to admit I am wrong.

Now is one of them.

In the past, I’ve been a fairly harsh critic of “western equitation”. Most especially, I’ve disliked, vociferously, the WE’s fashion for the horse to go ‘low and slow’. Their horse’s gaits are so very slow, slow enough that a lame human like myself can easily keep up on foot beside a ‘’’jogging’’ (trotting) Quarter Horse.

What I disliked most, though, was the fashion for ‘peanut rolling”. 

Well, at least he's on a loose rein

This was the form they approved of, one where the horse’s nose is a mere handful of inches above the ground. I could always tell, just by ear, when a Western Equitation class was being held in an arena, just from the coughing of the horse.

I still don’t like it, because it appears to me as if the low hanging heads were forced into that position.

Now I wonder if I was wrong because of typical bias, or wrong because while I’ve heard that the way they’re ‘trained’ is by tying their head high the night before a show, I’ve never actually witnessed it.  Somehow, though, I believe that it’s forced carriage. While a horse at liberty does carry his head relatively low, it’s not THAT low. 

In the past few years, I’ve heard that WE judges have changed their positions and now want to see a higher, more traditional head carriage, and a more natural speed of trot and canter. This is good news, and more power to them.

My bias has showed in my failure to attack the opposite position, that of rollkur , an affectation that is now common in upper level dressage. (This was not intentional. I don’t have the opportunity to see upper level, international dressage.)  

Is this a happy horse? NOT. His rider is a VERY famous and professional rider. This is "rollkur'.

 “Rollkur’ also known as ‘deep’, took the dressage world by storm. No one protested, because deep pocketed donors liked it, and famous riders and trainers did it. Suddenly, the horse that was ‘deep’ was winning despite not being correct.  In rollkur (I won’t go into the biomechanics of it too deeply), the horse’s head is sharply overbent, in some cases, the horse’s chin is literally touching it's chest. (as in the photo above).

WHY this occurred is beyond me. Was is it to give the impression of collection? Obedience? (to me, it looks like abject submission.) Acceptance of the bit? Or, was it more one of “that is so cool looking”? 

I think it is the latter. Dressage people, it appears, are no more resistant to a fad than any spangled, teal colored  spandex ‘western’ body suit than any Western Equitation costume designer. Flash wins ribbons. 
 

Butt ugly, but that's what wins ribbons. Don't think the clothing manufacturers wouldn't love to convince the FEI to accept shit like this in the gravy train of  dressage.

 
Like my friend’s Arabian stallion, substance, gentle, proper training and presentation gets the gate.

What is even more offensive is that several people who should know better, went all aboard on rollkur. It’s one thing to say, I want my horse to look like this because I’ll do anything-even hurt the horse- to get the prize.  It’s another, offensive thing altogether to say, if you don’t agree with me then you are obviously a moron. It is utterly criminal for the judges to flop over in acceptance of rollkur, in complete denial of the very rules they are hired to adhere to. 

Dressage ideology used to be based on the concept that things like collection must be achieved correctly and NOT by the use of force. Perhaps in the days since I learned about the basics of dressage, that has been dismissed. Perhaps the line about a horse’s head being ‘vertical’, neither ahead or behind the bit, fell off the page as the regulation was being printed. It certainly is being ignored by FEI judges.

Rollkur is, in reality, ‘overbent’ to a ridiculous degree. The rollkur horse is so far behind the vertical (aka behind the bit) there IS no ‘vertical’. It’s ‘diagonal’. It is achieved, in many cases, by bits that are decidedly NOT a ‘simple snaffle’ or a curb. 
No, they look at this monstrosity:

I see three sets of reins, and this 'double bridle' doesn't look very gentle.

Being ‘overbent’ or ‘behind the bit’ allows for higher movement in front, yet another concept of dressage being subsumed by flash. Now you see upper level horses (like Moorland Totilas) doing “high school’ movements in the same vein as Spanish riding.  I remember watching the World Equestrian Game’s horses in freestyle dressage…and Totilas won, I believe, by his high stepping.  

 This was NOT what I learned of classical dressage in the 70’s. In those days, balance, harmony and symmetry was the desired picture, not the  high stepping (in front and shuffling in back ) of a circus horse. But…when big money/big names take on a fad, even the FEI is not immune to the pressures.

As seems to be the case in competitive horse showing, dressage people are no different from the WE folks in going to extremes. Here’s a photo of a horse being ‘trained’ into carrying its head in “rollkur’.

 

This is not 'training'. It is  TORTURE.

 How different is this from a Western Equitation horse I saw being ‘trained’ by having her head tied by the bit to the cinch of the western saddle on her back? Was this ‘suppling”? Is this picture showing a horse ‘in training’? No. (note, too, how gaunt he is).

This isn’t ‘training’. It’s TORTURE. There’s not a bit of difference in the mindset here: force a horse into a physical position. Not one whit. Different flavor of horsemanship, but still-forcing a horse to hold its head in a way unnatural and uncomfortable, all for the sake of fashion, is CRUEL. It is abuse. It is certainly not Horsemanship. 

Now I begin to see that the WE folks, perhaps, weren't alone in training their horses to go in a specific head carriage for fad reasons, although I can’t think of a good reason for it, any more than I can justify rollkur.  In a nutshell, I believe in allowing a horse to carry his head like he wants. 

So. To the Western Equitation folks, I apologize. I was wrong. I was being a snob. If your horse rolls peanuts WITHOUT BEING FORCED, more power to him…and you.

So now we come to Raven.

Sue and I have been riding Raven on a very loose rein for about a year.

Raven has a long back, so it is difficult for him to shift his weight to his hindquarters. He’s heavy on the forehand. In addition, he had a heavy, ‘upside down’ neck, coming from that heavy on the forehand work. 

Sue came to the realization that Raven wasn’t happy with the typical collection, or being on the bit. 

So she let him have his head, literally. We’re still making him ‘work’ but not “in a frame”. By allowing him to trot, canter and mostly walk on a relatively long, relaxed rein, we are seeing something interesting: his neck has slimmed and has, over time, become arched. His back is coming up underneath us, and he is carrying himself. The underside of his neck is no longer bulging out. Allowing him to ride with his head down allows his back to come up, his weight shift back and his forehand to lighten. 

Here is how it works:

This is the mechanics of equine movement.

Most importantly, he has stopped ‘arguing’. This is not to say they were fighting, but Raven would not ‘listen’ to Sue. 

When she gave him more rein, his resistance stopped. He began to dance with her. His head came down and his eye brightened. 

To add: this is how a natural lowered head looks, and how Raven is traveling now.

Now I’m not saying he’s peanut rolling. Far from it, literally. He’s carrying it where he wants to carry it. The difference in his attitude and happiness is amazing. He always has been a good work horse, always ready to be ridden and worked. But now he is happier, in ways I cannot elucidate. Is it ‘pretty’? That depends on your definition of pretty. I think seeing a horse carrying himself, with a calm tail and a happy face, is far more attractive than a wired up horse in chains.

 I took a lesson on him a while ago, and the trainer kept urging me to take up more rein. I found myself holding onto the bit with hands of iron, and I don’t like that. I didn’t feel him ‘seeking contact”. I felt myself with a rock hard grip on his mouth. He took it without complaint, but I..I felt guilty afterwards.

I came to the conclusion that, if furthering my education in riding dressage means using the reins as a weapon, well, then, I’m not going to. If dressage has become nothing more than an overly expensive fashion show, I am out of here. 

I will still ride to the ancient precepts of dressage: harmony with the horse. WILLING obedience on the horse’s part, me doing MY job of carrying myself and working WITH him, not against him. Most especially, I won’t FORCE him to do something that might Look Good but isn’t in his best interest.

Every day is a bad hair day

I was born with a head full of wavy hair.

From that day forward to this, my hair has always been unruly. I know now that I have 6 cowlicks, all growing in different directions, lengths and speeds. In the summer it grows so fast that I have to get it cut every four weeks.

In all my life, I have never been able to get it to look neat. It’s virtually impossible to find someone to cut it so that it looks nice.

Having bad hair has always been a problem.

When I was a child, my mother used to nag me about my hair. “Your hair looks like a busted out mattress! DO something with it!”  What? Shave it off?  I haven’t the clue what to do with it.  But I didn’t have the wit to snap back with this retort, and probably would have been punished if I had. Shaving it may have made a temporary improvement in my appearance. But it would of course grown back, looking as it does now, as if a  trio of squirrels on LSD were nesting in it.

I was always being held accountable for my hair’s bad behavior.

I lived in South Korea for two years. South Koreans, being an exceptionally ‘pure’ population, (as opposed to mongrel me), all have hair that is black, straight and well behaved. The reason so many Koreans, both males and females ‘look alike’ ( I’m not stereotyping them) is that they all have the same hair, so there’s not much in the way of ‘fashion’. A bowl atop the head, a quick snip around their heads with scissors and voil`a, they are done, perfectly tonsured and neat as a pin.

I remember sitting in a Korean woman’s barber’s chair, hoping she could tame the hirsute beast atop my head. I heard her say (in Korean, which she was unaware I could speak) “this woman’s hair is crazy”.

Indeed.

Every picture of me shows a mass of hair that appears to be a black cloud of dust raised by a pair of battling bison.  Sometimes it looks like a giant muffin. Other times it grows wings beside each ear. I look like Bozo the clown. I have not one but TWO natural parts. One runs from my temple to just over my right ear to the back of my head. The other starts on the left side of my head and makes a dogleg at the top, making a hard right, where it ends in a cowlick. That one grows sideways across my forehead.

After I retired, I got a job that didn’t require me to look perfectly coiffed. Good thing, as my hair will never look anything but insane. One of my female co-workers started teasing me, calling me ‘cowlick girl’. Well, yeah. She had that right. Another female coworker claimed she’d been to a professional hair cutting school, and would I like her to try and make it behave?

Please? No problem. She tried. And tried. She gave me six haircuts in all. Every time they grew out in a different pattern. She stopped answering my phone calls for another appointment. I did manage to make one more. She refused to answer the doorbell. I know she was home. She was hiding from me. What a coward...why couldn't she just say I can't cut your hair anymore?

Being in the Army, I had to keep it short. This was helpful in that it made it easier to keep clean, but it never, ever looked right. That’s because haircutters would hide when they saw me walking into their salons.

While deployed to Iraq, I was unable to get my hair cut. It grew into a tangled mane that was totally un-military and hot as hell.

The Army usually provides each unit with a barber’s kit. The guys use it. They either shave or ‘buzz’-close crop-their heads in a war zone, for comfort and cleanliness. I would have done that but no one knew how to cut a woman’s hair.  I was miserable. When you live in the desert, you don’t have showers. You take cat baths out of a metal basin. Keeping your hair clean is pretty difficult.

One of my ‘attached’ soldiers (meaning, he was from a different Army post but was working with my unit) became our ‘barber’. I learned this when I saw him cutting my soldier's hair.

I asked him if he would shave my head. Really? Yes. I am so miserable.
 He looked around himself, and seeing that we were alone, asked me if I could keep a secret?

Yes, why?

Well, before he joined the Army, he’d been a lady’s hairdresser. No, he was not gay, but in American culture, a man who styles women’s hair is automatically considered to be gay..and in most cases, they are.

He said he would cut my hair ONLY IF I PROMISED not to tell the other guys that he cut it.

Oh, hell, that was easy. Please. I don’t care, I won't say a word,  just cut it, please.

The piles of hair at my feet looked as if I’d been at a sheep shearing. 
He must have taken six pounds of hair off my head. It felt great. 

When I returned from deployment, The Evil Sister...the one who'd always treated me like scum...insisted I get a 'perm'.
Still groggy, so to speak, from the 48 hour change from a desert war zone to a green Midwestern farm, I agreed.

BIG mistake. HUGE. I came out looking like Angela Davis, the Black Panther activist. Or, Grace Slick, the rock singer. My hair was  a huge dome of bubbled, tightly curled hair. I looked like a poodle on steroids. 



Because I've never learned what 'good' hair is, I am astounded at the comments the new hair cutter makes. 
They LOVE it. Oh my god, your hair. It's beautiful. It's thick, luscious,  it has 'body', look at these curls, it's a mane, you're like a lion, a horse. I'm in my sixties and don't have a grey hair.  It's so weird to have someone run her hands through the mass, extolling its health. Then they begin to cut, and the conversation stops. I can see her in the mirror, manfully attacking the mane in front of her. Her scissors makes the same type of noise a hedge trimmer makes. The hair falls in masses, but still, there's hair. More hair. More hair. 

After a while, the scissors stops, the woman wipes the sweat from her brow and she says, I am so sorry. I have butchered you. I've never seen hair like yours. I even had one say, you don't have to pay me. 
Well, of course I do..and did. It's not her fault. I say,

"It's okay. I'm used to it. If you promise to keep it cut, I won't blame you for  the way it looks."
 
I have given up. Now all I do is keep it clean and run a brush through it in the morning, so I can say I DID brush my hair. I have a friend who cuts it now, with no promises other than she'll take off the overburden. That's all I ask. Sometimes it looks okay. Sometimes it looks insane. A ball cap covers it quite nicely.
 
As for the soldier who cut my hair-it was the best haircut I ever got in my life. 

I had to go to a combat zone to get the perfect haircut.

Lessons learned

I have been offline for over a week. Well, actually, my computer has been in hospital for a week.

My last post related that an evil thief had inserted a virus into my computer.

Now I know how, and what, it was.

It got into my computer when I made the mistake of clicking on what I thought was a recipe from a friend of mine. I didn’t know he had a cooking blog, and now, I know, he didn’t.

This person or persons got into my computer and inserted a Trojan horse virus in my Through the Bridle Lightly blog, by going through the desktop shortcut.

Don’t worry, you won’t catch it from reading this. Or even commenting, as you probably don’t have a shortcut to my computer. Once I realized my computer was infected, I disconnected from the net and took it to someone I thought would remove the virus.

It was in his shop for three days. He noodled around with it, but the moment I got it home and reconnected to the net, the virus re-inserted itself immediately. Not only that, it had morphed, changing to fit the situation. The original had been removed? But still, there were a few lines of code left that told the virus to mutate as it was under attack.

 The virus did a lot of searching throughout my computer. Fortunately, I don’t keep bank accounts, or things like my social security number on my computer. 

I then took it to a REAL computer repairman, who kept it for another three days. He removed the hard drive and put it on another machine, and within minutes of starting a virus removal program, the virus did the nasty job it had been created for: it killed my hard drive.

But, like surgery, that also made it so that it will never infect my computer again. The hard drive was already several years old, so I had a new one installed. That took care of the virus.

It also took care of all my settings. But fortunately, I back up my computer at least once a week. So I lost nothing but a month of work, and I’d not done much. The repairman was so grateful, he kept saying, thank you for backing your files up. So often someone brings an ailing or dead computer into his office saying oh my god, get it back for me, back up, what do you mean back up? Data recovery from a dead hard drive is almost impossible.

In the meantime, I’d purchased a new laptop. It had Windows 10 on it.

Without any more time wastage, let me tell you, do NOT go near Windows 10. It is worse than a virus. You know a virus is bad. But Windows 10 is even worse in that it’s just as controlling, it just doesn’t kill your computer. But it enslaves it. It is not yours. Windows 10 updates when it chooses, whether or not you have the internet connection that can tolerate hours and hours of updates.

10 has a thing called Cortana. Cortana is supposed to be an assistant, but what it really does is get in your way and insist on doing things the way Microsoft wants, not you. For instance, Cortana sends information on what you are doing online to Microsoft. Don’t want that invasion of your privacy? Don’t want to pay for that data harvesting? Tough shit. You are going to do it.

Writing, composing, etc? You now have to PAY a subscription in order to compose anything on your computer. No longer can you use Word. Nope, now you have to buy it.

Want to change the way things look on your screen? Nope, that is virtually impossible.

Want to search? You get bing. Bing is useless as a search engine. Microsoft wants to challenge Google, so created bing (I can’t bring myself to give it the respect of a capital letter). So you must go to cortana, type in a word that you want searched, it goes to bing which takes the information off of: Google.

Plus you get ads. Lots of them.

Don’t want them?
Tough shit. You are going to get them. They’re harvesting your data to sell to advertisers.

There are things they left in place: your choice of a thousand different fonts. How often do you use wing dings? Never? Me, too. I need two fonts, not a million. But no, someone in Microsoft has the clout to keep all those stupid fonts in your machine, taking up space. 

With 10, you also get bloatware. TONS of it. Programs you will never, ever use. The ones you DO want to use, you are now required to pay extra money for. Excel? Power Point? Gone…unless you pay. There’s a phony trio of processing programs but you only get them for 30 days. Then you have to buy them or spend extra money for the Office 360 ‘suite” for a lot of money.  

Let’s say you have a photo you want to send to someone in an email.

Photo Manager is gone. In its place is a thing called Paint. Paint allows you to crop, and change the color values. But you can’t resize it from a 2 MB picture to something manageable, like 800 kb. If you want to to do that, you have to BUY a program off the Microsoft “Store” (a wannabe Google Play Store) and pay a subscription…just to resize a photo. 

Want to shut it down? No “Start” button (which in itself was stupid…why “Start” and not ‘Shut Down”? You’ve already started the computer and Windows, “Start’ is illogical. But we’ve learned to click on the start button to shut down the computer.

But no more. Now there is a windows icon where the start button used to be, and you have to do two more steps to get the computer to shut down.

Microsoft doesn’t WANT you to shut down the computer. It wants to keep it’s greedly fingers in your machine at all times, to harvest data, to store WHAT? And to get more money from you.

What Windows has become is lucrative extortion, a way of getting you to shell out more money for what is already a useless program. It’s become so user unfriendly, so infuriating in lack of services, that I took my brand new laptop to the same repairman who had my trusty PC in his shop and said, Remove 10 and put Windows 7 on the laptop, as well as restoring it on the PC.

He did. Now I no longer have to deal with Windows 10.

So here is what I’ve learned, and you should take my experience as hard won advice.

1.   Back up your data. Today. NOW. Use an external hard drive that you can physically disconnect from your computer. Back up OFTEN.

2.   Never click on a picture in a blog that seems suspicious.I don’t care if you don’t ever click on a link in my blogs, probably I won’t ever put a link in again. I will instead write out the link to my Blogger blog, The Horse Mad Scientist. Please DO go to my Horse Mad blog, though. I’ve missed writing.

3.   Don’t put a shortcut on your desktop. Always type in the URL.

4.   Run virus and malware checks OFTEN. That’s how I found mine.

5.   Don’t pay for aggravation. Windows 10 isn’t worth it. Keep 7. They are supposed to keep updating it until 2020, and quite honestly, I hope by then, someone creates a Windows like program that doesn’t grab you by your heels to shake every bit of money out of you.

6.   Don’t keep passwords in a folder titled as such.

7.   Don’t keep financial or private information on your computer.
8. Change your passwords OFTEN. Make them difficult to remember (write them down!) and use symbols, numbers, upper and lower case letters. I know, it's a pain in the ass, but it's how my computer was so thoroughly invaded...I'd used the same password for many programs. Use a different password for each program/website/account, etc. 

Good luck. The thieves are getting craftier, better at penetrating your defenses. Even something as mundane as a horse oriented blog is no longer safe.

Back in the saddle

After two weeks (and still tussling), I am back. The virus I wrote about destroyed my hard drive. I will post about that later.