I started my equine career in the late eighties, during the collapse of the Arabian industry in Scottsdale Arizona. I was at dinner, celebrating Lasma Arabian’s successful final auction before they closed their barn and moved back to Kentucky. I was sitting next to one of the trainers, and we were naturally talking horses, and I (being quite young) mentioned that I was not especially enamored of Arabians, as I felt that outside of endurance they possessed very little by way of natural talent.
The conversation deteriorated from there. My contention was that, yes arabians could jump and cut cattle and rein, but why make them? They are not especially good at it, they weren’t bred for it and they certainly aren’t built for it.
I am not just picking on Arabians here, I wouldn’t turn a warm blood into a barrel horse. I happen to love thoroughbreds, but I wouldn’t try to win a reining class on one.
Horses were bred to perform different actions. They have hundreds of years of genetics aiming their bodies and movement in a certain direction, so the question is why beat yourself and them up trying to make them do something that they will find physically very difficult? You wouldn’t give Charles Barkley much of a chance as a gymnast, and most runners make awful linebackers. So why make a horse built for something else try to be something it isn’t?
Now before I get reams of hate mail I know that there are exceptions to all rules, Threes and Sevens was a Grand Prix jumper in the late 80’s, a full blooded quarter horse. I am sure there are others.
This is about most horses, and what their conformation tells us they can do. Take a little paint horse I owned. His shoulder was below his hip, his feet faced each other and he was 14.2 hh. There was no latent jumper lurking in this horse, nor a dressage prospect waiting to be discovered. He had to exhaust himself to carry his inside shoulder when he cantered, how fair would it have been to ask him to bend at his post-legged hocks and carry more weight behind?
As a dressage trainer, I taught him enough so that he could carry himself without being a balance runaway, and that was it. Sure I could have taught him all the moves and made both our lives miserable and turned him into an approximation of a first or second level a dressage horse, but why? He wanted to chase cows, he was bred to chase cows. I don’t chase cows, so I found someone who did, and everybody is happy.
I am not opposed to breed shows per se, but where things get ugly is when instead of allowing your Arab to have a chance to demonstrate something for which it wasn’t bred, a cross training of sorts, these outlier disciplines become just as important as the disciplines for which the horse was actually bred. Quarter horses have now almost split into two different breeds, with half remaining short and cowy, like my paint, and others tall and thoroughbred, for the English disciplines. Again, to what purpose?
Either you want an excellent dressage horse or you want a quarter horse, why must you have both? This is lose lose. The horse loses because unless it was bred for the discipline, it will likely always remain a square peg being jammed into a round hole. The horse will also lose because it will be trying to fight hundreds of generations of breeding, which will lead to lameness and sourness.
Now, again, I believe absolutely that horses benefit, just as we do, from trying new things, all of my dressage horses played on the trail course, jumped if they seemed to like it, could be trail ridden, or breezed out on the track. I do not believe that one discipline alone will satisfy all of a horse’s (or rider’s) physical or mental needs. Nor do I believe that people showing at the local level, or kids, need a horse for every discipline. What I do believe is when that kid decides they want to be an Olympian, that they not try to pursue that dream on their Morgan.