Chris Bartle – with help from Ingrid Klimke and Hale Bob, tells us:
“Piaffe with an event horse is a very relevant exercise. Dressage training in a classical sense was all about training a horse to carry itself, to be able to respond to the rider’s direction, but not to lose its initiative and not to lose its ability to be a true partner to the rider.”
“There have been trainers in the dressage world, and this takes us back to the whole discussion of rolkur, where you are taking away from the horses, their spirit, their ability to look after themselves, you are internalizing them too much. That type of dressage training is contradictory to eventing, and contradictory to dressage…”
“That style of training is more about producing spectacular movement, and it is more about circus than dressage.”
