Pain Free Riding
What to do, briefly [Cosa fare, in breve]
Main core of the website
Home page
Pain sources
What to do, briefly
Other topics
"Fear of the Bit" by R. Cook - HTML rendering
Gnus and horses: Free Circulation of Knowledge
A letter from J. Jackson: About a Soundness Scale
What you need, to overcome mythos and misunderstandings that plague traditional horsemanship, is really simple. You only need to study from good, scientifically based, updated sources.1.
Concerning Pain Free Riding, you have to study and to review deeply all what you "know" about three topics at least:
1. how to have sound and strong hooves in your horse, to ensure lots of painless and not wearing movement to it, as it needs;
2. how to give up pain as a communication method;
3. how to prevent back pain, taking in account alternatives to traditional stiff saddles too.
1. How to
have sound and strong hooves in your horse, to ensure lots of painless
and not wearing movement to it, as it needs."No foot, no horse". It's true. Horses live to move, and move to live. The hoof health influences the health of the whole horse. But the reciprocal is true too: the whole horse health influences its hooves health. Both are far from good in the mean domestic horse. To overcome this vicious circle, you have to work both on whole health of the horse (first of all, taking into account its diet and boarding settings) and on its hooves health (first of all, rehabilitating them from damages by shoes).
The critical review of "traditional knowledge" about those topics by scientific methods is a recent one. Best resources are linked to "Barefoot Horse Movement", grown up after the excellent book "The Natural Horse" by Jaime Jackson and his unbelievable success in horse rehabilitation.
If your English is not so bad, please study HOG ("Horse Owner's Guide") by Jaime Jackson (his website: www.primechoice.com/jaime-jackson/) ) first of all, and consider then the other by the same author (you can find them at home.alltel.net/star/). Unluckily, there is no Italian translation of these books so far.
English websites:
www.barefoothorse.com: The Marjorie Smith's website. She is an enthusiast divulger, and her experience and sensitiveness will let you think a lot. You'll find many highly selected links in her website: your better is following all of them.
www.hoofrehab.com: The Pete Ramey's website. Read it (mainly his "Articles"), but after some study about Barefoot Horse culture and techniques. You'll have than an idea about current, excellent results of full rehabilitation of "irrecoverable" horses, and of their scientific grounds.
www.ironfree.com: The websites by Paige Poss and by her friends. Marvelous images will bring you deep into the technique of barefoot "wild horse" natural trim.
| Italian translations of the above websites
are here hosted in this website (section "Fear of
the Bit") |
www.barefoothorseitalia.com : The official website of Barefoot Horse Italia.
www.proequo.com: The website by Carlo Faillace, covering many topics concerning horse welfare and horse rights. A strong encouragement to have a much more human approach to any horse.
Barefoot Horse Webring:
http://w.webring.com/hub?ring=barefoothorses : a "ring" of selected websites about Barefoot Horse, that you can browse as a list of connected items.
2.
how to give up pain as a communication method; The comprehensive study of animal languages (a main part of ethology) is a recent one; soon after came scientific studies about the opportunity to have a man-animal communication by their own language. Read something by Konrad Lorentz on this topic (at least, his "The Ring of King Salomon").
Monty Roberts found then that such a man-animal communication by horses language, that he named "Equus", could be effectively used in horse "breaking" and training, and he deeply changed former techniques, based on horse pain and mortification.
Bridles - any bitted one, and some bitless too - let men "communicate" with the horse by pain, or by threat of impending pain. They are an obvious remnant of pre-Monty Roberts mind about horses. Any bit interferes with respiration too, being a foreign body into the horse mouth at exercise - a fully unnatural condition.
Nowadays you can choose among many alternatives to those "prehistorical" instruments. Some of them can be applied to your horse immediately, without any specific training of the horse/rider.
If you want read some very convincing arguments against pain as a communication method, and particularly against any kind of bit, consider the studies of dr. Robert Cook on www.bitlessbridle.com.
3. how to prevent back pain, taking in account
alternatives to traditional stiff saddles.Evolution obviously provided that the horse should bear some additive weight; as an example, think about the additive weight born by a pregnant mare (comparable to that of a adult man). Nevertheless, evolution did not provided that such an additive weight should be born on the horse back. Nevertheless, luckily and by change, a healthy horse can do it - perhaps horses would not survive so far, if they could not.
They can do it, but it is probably a performance near their limits. As a rider, if you don't want to exceed those limits, you have to avoid:
- to overload the horse;
- to force it in a unnatural posture (if you are not an
excellent rider, don't try any collection; a false collection is much
worse than no collection at all for your horse's back, and it is very
unpleasant to see too)
- to use a less than perfectly fitting saddle.
That's all. If you are interested about, browse into suggested links. In any of them you'll find lots of suggestions and selected links too.
Luisa e Alex