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May 2007 • VOLUME 21 • © HORSES For LIFE™ Magazine
Zdzislaw Baranovski’s "International Horseman’s Dictionary defines "lightness" in this way: "high degree of responsiveness to the finest aids". Let us try to consider this definition seriously. We could think that any good training, whichever the principles of whichever school it was abiding by, will lead to this ideal. But we know that this is not the case; at the highest level, i.e. the Olympic riders do not look like resting on their horses’ back. The aids are visible, implying a physical effort. The horses are obviously not displaying a "high degree of responsiveness to the finest aids". Lightness is absent. Two culprits may be fingered out: imperfect balance, and imperfect schooling to the aids. Indeed, the more balance there is, the more eager a horse will be to respond to the aids. Though even he should understand what those latter mean, which he can only do after the proper schooling. Let’s deal with this schooling first. A very old and common error is to take the effect of the aids for granted, whereas they draw their power from a conditioning. This applies more particularly to the legs: we all know the case of young horses trying to bite the rider’s boot, the first time they are confronted to the leg action. If the impulsive action of the rider’s legs were natural, this would not happen. Any conditioning is based on association and repetition. For instance, experimenting with dogs, Pavlov would associate the presence of a meal to the ringing of a bell, and after repeating the operation eighty times in a row, he had the salivation reflex of a dog "conditioned". In the absence of a meal, the dog would salivate when the bell was ringing. An artificial trigger, the bell had been "loaded" with the meaning of the meat, a natural trigger. This applies to the schooling of a horse to the legs. Associating systematically legs and whip will progressively "load" the legs with the meaning of the whip. After awhile, the whip won’t be any more necessary, the legs will suffice, although in the beginning they meant nothing for the horse. Subsequently, we should try to avoid using our legs only to maintain a gait, because this would be associating a constant use of the legs to a constant speed. Rapidly, the horse would understand that when we quit using our legs, he should slow or stop. The leg then would have lost its accelerating value. And from a halt, a horse would move forward only hesitatingly upon his being cued by the legs, for proceeding forward from a halt is acceleration. This is not lightness, a "high degree of responsiveness to the finest aids". Therefore we should practice the "release of legs", whereby the leg action quits as soon as the desired result was obtained. Should we practice the "release of hand" ? Certainly, because if not, we would have to maintain a constant traction on the reins in order to get a constant speed, and all the same as a horse non trained in the release of legs will slow when the legs quit, a horse non trained in the release of hand will accelerate when the hand quits. And then we could never really stop a horse, since after the halt, the reins must be abandoned, and upon this happening, the ill trained horse would tend to move forward. So the release of the aids, legs and hand should be the first principle of riding in lightness. With this principle, the aids should create, restore, modify; they should never maintain. The aids intervene only for transitions. When there is no need for a transition, the aids must be absent. The horse is therefore left at liberty "on parole". This is not a refinement to appear by the end of training, this is a contract we should present the horse with by his first lesson. We have seen that the effect of the aids should not be taken for granted, since they do not have any noticeable, physiologically compelling effect. But with this respect, there is some difference between the situation of the legs and this of the hand, because although a poor brake, the hand may claim some naturally inhibitive effect. Any brake is a hindrance. It comes athwart something. The shoes of a brake take the mechanical energy out of the motion by transforming it into caloric energy. In the same way, the bit in the horse’s mouth is an inhibitive factor, which is likely to make a horse slow (albeit sometimes a horse will respond to the irritation created by the pressure of the bit by accelerating, but this is not the general case). And here comes a second problem:
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