As Jonica Newby reports, science has news for horse riders.

They may be surprised to discover they’ve actually been riding blind. A neuroscientist from Western Australia made this amazing discovery while investigating how horses see.

Theresa started a fire storm last year when she posted on her site pictures of a warm up of some of the top riders in dressage. The pictures were so shocking and created such an outcry that this one woman's efforts were in large part the reason for the FEI Symposium to study the matter further. It did come at great cost to Theresa, and while the battle raged she was forced to close her site.

A recent study of pouch position with respect to the carotid artery blood supply of the brain offers evidence that they keep the brain from overheating during exercise. Discover how surprising much the shape of the deeper lying guttural pouch can be distorted

Find out about what drove this women to start her own crusade. How long she has been at it and what she is doing now. How she has made "rollkur" her cause, the difficulties she has encountered and why more people are not speaking out in this frank interview.

Comparing and investigating the different positions of the head using computer modeling to show us how this affects the inside as well as the outside of the horse. Then using this investigative information to decide on what should we be doing with our training.

Translation. The attitude dressage horses adopt for their training leads to chronic overstraining of the anchoring where the neck tendon is attached at the back of the skull. This is the conclusion reached by Horst Weiler of the free Universitet in Berlin in a scientific publication which earned him the title of hoogleraar.

The FEI: In Their Own Words

Let us look at their own words. At the words of the F.E.I. Let us look to see if we can recognize in these words the work we see done in these pictures and videos.

Don't know what the fuss is all about? Here is the workshop reprinted for you on the use of over bending ("Rollkur") now to be called hyper-flexion as concluded by the FEI. This represents the current position of the FEI.

But times change and new horses are bred, and new riders come along. It is a time of invention. Of cars and computers, we get so used to inventing we think we can reinvent everything. Including the horse.

"It has been postulated that upper airway impedence is reduced when the head and neck are extended and that upper airway impedance is increased when the neck is flexed and the head is in a tucked position (Cook 1981)." A review of the articles in Horses For LIFE on the mechanics of flexion and breathing. When is too much, too much?

To hold the head back, either the horse has to lean on the riders hands, or he has to pull the head back himself. He does so by shortening the Scalenus Medius going between the top of the jaw to the middle of the neck and the Sterno-mandibularis that goes from the lower edge of the jaw to the breast bone. This pulls the jaw back and the middle of the neck forward. So his mouth opens.