Horses for LIFE - Online Horse Magazine - Natural to Classical Dressage

• VOLUME 40 • © HORSES For LIFE™ Magazine

"Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. This is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil."
Albert Schweitzer

True Equestrianism holds this as a truism. That the fundamental
principle is to promote and enhance the life of the creature that we
call a horse. That limiting him not only limits him, but us as well.
Sad for us, but an evil to the nature of the horse.

Dressage takes this as a truism as well, that we must enhance the
horse's most essential essence - that of movement and motion and
beauty, and that limiting the horse's movement and presence injures
the horse both physically and mentally.

How can we maintain, promote, and enhance life for the horse, and in turn how is it that we destroy, injure and limit his life?

We maintain, by letting him keep what he was born with. That through the process of training, of handling, the horse is in no way diminished. That in the process of getting a horse we are comfortable leading, we have not in the process taken away his joy, the expressiveness of his being. That in the process of getting a horse that we feel safe on top of, we have not created something other than what he was before we began. Does he continue to feel joy in movement, delight in feeling of the grass as his hooves grip them in his efforts to race the wind?

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