Chazot Thoughts 89

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“Imagine if schools actually helped kids identify their strengths by exploring their talents from a young age and growing their skills over the 12 years instead of letting them all follow the same routine and leaving them confused in life after graduation.”  Tallie Dar

This school exists. It can be resumed in a few words, “teach us and learn from us.” I am not talking learning from our herd life. This angle has been largely over-exploited and does not teach much. The difference between species is significant, both in the sensory information that is available and the particular interpretation made of that information by the brain. Early in the 20th century, J. von Uexkull used the term “Umwelt” to characterize the particular perceptual word of species. Each specie, human, equine, has developed its own Umwelt extracting from the external world, the information that its ancestors needed for survival. Inevitably one interprets the actions and behavior of another specie member in respect of his or her own species-specific perception of reality. As humans, you are prone to interpret our reactions as behavior issue and lack of intelligence. Most often, you are not knowledgeable and intelligent enough to understand that the real explanation is a mismatch of Umwelts.

 When you teach us the piaff activating out hind legs with a dressage whip or other probe, you have no knowledge of the biomechanics of the piaff. Indeed, you stimulate reflexes that hamper our ability to execute the piaff at the best of our talent and soundly. We are intelligent enough to guess what your “aids” (gestures) are supposed to mean, but we execute the move compromising between esthetic and function. We understand how the move is supposed to look like and protect simultaneously whatever dysfunction, muscle imbalance, morphological flaw or other issue that is part of our body state. You should analyze our difficulties based on sound understanding of the underlying biomechanics factors. You should direct our education on the development and the coordination of our many systems allowing us to express our talent. Instead, you judge our difficulties or resistances as lack of obedience and/or lack of intelligence. Your arrogance matches your incompetence. You know one routine and do not take responsibility for the fact that your routine let us physically and mentally unprepared for the athletic demand of the move.

The equitation turning you into a better person is the one educating and coordinating our physique for the athletic demand of the performance. You rise then above the traditional but archaic concept of obedience. Classic authors praise patience and even adaptation, but always within the concept of obedience to the aids. “Once the horse has overcome his initial clumsiness, he will obey the aids instead of distorting their effects by resistances the origin of which eludes us.” (General Decarpentry, Academic Equitation, 1949) At this time, the understanding of equine biomechanics was in its infancy and the clumsiness was attributed to our inexperience or lack of athleticisms. Many of us figure compromises allowing to meet the judging standards but with a dysfunctional physique. The dysfunction induced abnormal stress on our joints, tendons, muscle groups, fascia, and lameness ends our career.

It is your task to analyze our “clumsiness.” We process based on the insights that you provide to us, while simultaneously protecting our body state. You have the capacity of analysis. We express honestly our difficulties and expect that your insights guide us toward a more sophisticated body coordination. When all we receive from you is judgements, we turn our slavery into survival executing the move at the best of our dysfunction.

There is an art that we gladly share with you. This art is creating the athletic development and coordination of our physique optimally adapted to the athletic demand of the performance. Whatever the performance is a complex dressage movement, a jumping course, a cross country question, or efficient and sound gait through the country side, the art is teaching us ease and effortlessness through optimum efficiency. As each of us is unique, the art cannot be making us fit a formula. The art is precisely analyzing how my body, or another horse specific body, needs to be coordinate to benefit from the gymnastic exercise and execute the gait or the move at the best of my talent. The art is creating such optimal muscular development and coordination.

It is an art that we understand well as it is for us ease, effortlessness, and soundness. We participate to the creation of the masterpiece since you can only stimulate our superficial systems. The conversation is then between us explaining how, at this moment, we interpret your insights protecting our body, and you encouraging our brain to achieve greater efficiency exploring different and more complex orchestration of our physique. It is a refined dialogue based on subtle nuances in muscle tone. We are comfortable at this level of subtlety as this is our natural refinement. We have a very high perception and we are open to sophisticated conversation as long as we don’t have to protect our physique and senses from your crud gestures, shifts of your body weight, or instability of your saddle.

Even with refinement, your art of the correct aids is not the equestrian art; it is not a partnership; it is just a demonstration of skill where you take credit for our talent. The equestrian art that give you a lesson of life is a partnership where two intelligence respecting each other’s capacities and limits work for the accomplishment of a body coordination allowing us to perform at the best of our athletic abilities and doing so effortlessly and soundly. How can you claim to be an artist if the dysfunction of our physique that you have been incapable to correct or elected to ignore, condemn us to suffering and lameness.  

“People don’t realize how hard it is to speak the truth in a world full of peoples that don’t realize they’re living a lie.” (Edward Snowden) The ones who apply the aids and expect us to succeed are living a lie. At the contrary, the ones who have the strength to identify our strengths, the ones who help us exploring our talent, the ones who use their knowledge to grow our skill, are the students of the best school of life.

“Maybe I am a dreamer, but I am not the only one.” (John Lennon) He (Jean Luc Cornille) explains how to upgrade one’s equitation to actual knowledge, and all over the world, more and more riders discover the real horse that they own and the greatness of a conversation leading to the mastery of tensegrity, elastic energy, and other components of gaits and performances.  

Chazot.

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