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 MY HORSE IS STUBBORNBy Jean-Claude Racinet Let me tell you about doctors. Doctors – more so general practitioners – don’t have much of an enviable lot; here they are, facing somebody they don’t know, listening to his/her complaints, asking questions which will perhaps be misunderstood and ill answered, trying to sort out and organize the scanty information thusly gathered, and bound to come up at once with the right diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment – or else! To my knowledge, this fate is shared by only one other profession, that of a riding clinician. Here you are, facing a rider/horse pair which you’ve never seen and perhaps will never see again, asking questions that the horse perhaps understands (who knows?) but cannot answer, whereas the rider can answer but perhaps doesn’t understand. And you have to come up with the right formula now! You have to be a miracle doctor; or else, well, your reputation was grossly overestimated. One of the main complaints one is exposed to is, “My horse is stubborn!” Now imagine yourself telling your doctor. “My pancreas is stubborn,” and what if the doctor would answer, “OK. You’re suffering from a stubborn pancreas, a condition listed by medical science. Ablation is the only known cure.” Unfortunately, you will find people more prone to part with their pancreas than with their horse, so the riding clinician has no other choice than to unstubborn the darn beast right off the bat. Which is sometimes easier said than done. In the past, I would think to myself, “OK, here is one more person who is trying to bestow upon her/his horse her/his own failures. It all boils down to a faulty application of the aids.“ So, under the very suspicious and reprobating look of the owner, I would ride the horse and demonstrate how a proper wielding of the aids, according to the immortal classical principles, would like aspirin, take care of all the problems. And lo and behold, sometimes it would work, which would bring a very soft reward to the clinician’s ego. Some other times, though… well, let’s gloss over it. But now, I don’t put myself into this kind of trouble, because now, I know! Aha! If a right application of the aids has not brought about a real breakthrough after 20 minutes, I know that the answer is not to be found in the equitation but elsewhere. How do I know? That’s a long story I am going to try to make short.
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