The first horse I started under saddle was called “Une Aventure” (One Adventure) and was aptly named.  She was very safe and kind but I was 14 years old and knew nothing about the subject. My first teacher at the French riding club where I started my career was Captain Hubert Clauzel, a retired officer of the Spahis (a French light cavalry regiment with riders from North Africa and Barb horses). He was not at all a technical rider and taught us mostly by making us experience situations. We had 120 horses in the barn at any given time, many of them from Spain, others from the racetrack (Thoroughbreds and trotters), some fancier Selle Français and Anglo-Arabs, as well as many horses rescued from the slaughter house Rue de Vaugirard, where horsemen could get their pick on Monday mornings.

Une Aventure came by truck from Poland as a three-year-old and was bought by Clauzel to be a lesson/trail riding horse for the school. She was gray and maybe 14.2 hands. He decided that I could probably do the job and get her started and I eagerly accepted the challenge. I never received any advice on how to do it, so I devised a system to make her safe, as I was never one to sit on bucking horses. I worked her every evening after school and had no assistance whatsoever, so I had to make sure she would be completely safe when I got on her by myself.

I lunged her on every kind of circle in all three gaits, worked at liberty in the small indoor (45 X 90 feet), taught her to travel into corners, do directional changes and circles and, most importantly, stop on voice command from any gait. By the time I thought she was ready to be ridden, I also taught her to tolerate a chair next to her that I used as a mounting block. As beginner’s luck had it, she never gave me any kind of grief and was probably grateful for the alternate life she got once rescued from the kill truck. After she demonstrated that she was reliable in the arena by herself, I started to take her out in the vast forest that lay behind the club in the company of friends mounted on older, experienced horses and she went everywhere with confidence. Two months later, she became a lesson horse, first with the better riders and eventually with beginners, as she was very safe and pleasant to ride.

Starting Younsters with Nuno

When I was twenty, I started a one year apprenticeship at Nuno Oliveira’s old school near Lisbon. On one occasion, he received five young horses straight from the breeder that he was planning to train and sell. They were related to two older horses he had in training at the time (Impostor and Invencivel) whom he was very fond of. Those horses came straight from the field and had absolutely no handling. His regular rider was unavailable and so I got the job to ride the colts. What was notable in his approach was the amount of forwardness he insisted on. While I was riding on the lunge, he held it (that is the most important job in the whole process), had one helper at his side pushing the horse with a lunge whip and at first two others on the open side of the manege to “frame” the horse and avoid any deviation from the circle. Progressively, I took over the job of maintaining the impulsion. Horses were ridden with a bridle equipped with a semi-loose dropped noseband and a cavesson.

The loose ring bit was attached to the rings of the dropped noseband, so all rein actions were applied to the nose as much as the mouth. The whip was a simple branch from a quince tree that was used generously. After a few days on the lunge line, horses were warmed up at liberty before riding, with several handlers guiding them on long sides, circles and diagonals. When first ridden off the lunge line, the handlers made sure that the horse kept his direction and follow the “geometry of the manege” by being pushed forward instead of being pulled around by the reins. The lessons were entirely composed of trot and canter work, as it is difficult to obtain a forward walk from a young horse at first. I rode the horses individually for several weeks until Nuno considered them safe for the regular students to ride, where they were ridden as a group, a “reprise,” as we say in French.

I kept riding the more complicated one (a Luso-Arab stallion with very big gaits and a character to match called Jasmin, a totally unsuitable name). By that point, the horses were ready to start shoulder-in, working trot to medium trot transitions and canter from the walk, as well as free walk on a loose rein. The progression toward the rest of the lateral work was quick and collection was started in hand toward piaffe within a few months. The bottom line of Nuno’s approach was that if a horse really goes and thinks forward, the body is loosened up and the self-carriage is achieved from the beginning as the horse is never allowed to lean on the hand. The contact must be “honest” — the horse always going to the bridle, following it when the hand outside the turn advances, slowing when the hand is raised for a stride, or halting on a double upward action of the hand accompanied with a straightening of the rider’s torso.

The entire schooling process is about developing the quality of the horse’s responses to the aids, an education in language development. Learning to understand and follow the rider’s weight displacements and the actions of the hand and legs while doing the exercises is the goal. A language without application is worthless, but exercises without the surety of comprehension and goodwill of the horse and the refinement of his responses have no real usefulness as a basis for dressage. According to Nuno, the training of the horse does not consist in practicing exercises endlessly until the horse is dulled by the routine, but rather to shape his body and his mind through a physical conversation that becomes more and more sophisticated as time goes on. This process starts from the very first of the young horse’s training.

Dom Jose Athayde

After my time with Nuno, I became an assistant to my recently departed master Dom Jose Athayde, who was the riding director for the National Stud of Alter do Chao where the Alter Real horses of the Portuguese School of Equestrian Art are bred. The farm started fifteen males and fifteen females every year for the purpose of deciding on their breeding value. The method was essentially the same as Nuno’s, as Dom Jose had worked with him for many years as an assistant. Usually I was given the better three-year-olds, who had a chance to stay as future stallions, and I rode some of them until they were five and six, after which Dom Jose took them over if they were going to stay at stud their entire life. The mares were only ridden for a year after which they either went for auction or entered the broodmare band.

My other job was to ride older stallions that Dom Jose and Dr. Borba (founding teacher of the Royal Andalusian School and founding director of the Portuguese School) had previously trained. This allowed me to experience the continuity of training with horses ranging from three to eighteen. They all went the same way and were rideable by any rider with a reasonable level of education. Self-carriage was never an issue, neither was obedience or general impulsion. The Alters are extremely sensitive horses who require delicate aids, so after four years of riding them, the Thoroughbreds I later rode while training in England never felt too complicated.

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New Developments in the U.S.

When I moved to the United States in 1984, I witnessed an entirely different approach to horse starting: the “New Age of Horsemanship” was popular and everybody was talking about behavior and ethology. I had read the writings of Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape) and Konrad Lorenz (who won a Nobel prize for his work in ethology, the study of animal behavior, in particular animal language, the imprinting of goslings, aggression, etc.). I met Tom Dorrance in California and also a student of Glen Randall (the trainer for movies including The Black Stallion and Ben Hur). I saw Pat Parelli give his early demos. I actually gave a dressage demo at Monte Roberts’ Flag Is Up Farms. I also started some jumping horses, Olisco, Faylor and Quick Star, for own er Judy Lennon, who had bred them out of the French mare Stella de Paulstra. Quick Star became a leading stallion and had sired Big Star, Nick Skelton’s Olympic gold medalist in Rio.

The “new idea” of recognizing horse behavior improvement in the form of chewing and licking is not very far removed from Baucher’s idea of the “release of the jaw” as the sign of physical and emotional relaxation. The evaluation and modification of behavior became the central theme of natural horsemanship, a term coined by Pat Parelli. This recent obsession totally bypassed any understanding of biomechanics, in particular the function of equilibrium (the uprightness of the horse from side to side and back to front) in relation to impulsion (the desire to move forward) and self-carriage (the modulation of the horse’s speed and direction by the rider’s posture and a light contact on the reins).

In other words, what is being attributed to the horse’s good or ill will is a direct reflection of his innate asymmetry that makes him go faster in one direction and slower in the other when confronted by human interference (“the aids”). As far as horse training is concerned, what really matters is not the opinion of some author on the supposed intentions of a horse (nobody really knows that for sure), but what can be done to change the horse’s reactions to contact (“the School of the Aids”) and his activity and balance.

For instance, a horse that is permanently keeping his left front leg slightly ahead of his body, will have the “brakes” on in that direction, while standing above and ahead of his right front foot will create an unbalance in that direction. One solution for the horse is to contact his right side to prevent the unbalance, the other is simply to lose control over it and always go faster in that direction. Either way, this unbalance to the right (and subsequent muscular contractions) is responsible for a permanent degree of anxiety and a limitation of his breathing on that side. This brings us to two training solutions: relaxing the back of the horse, particularly when going to the right, and reestablishing his uprightness by teaching him to put the weight on top of his left shoulder. (“Always place the shoulders in front of the haunches, and not the opposite” according to General L’Hotte and Gustav Steinbrecht.)

Reflections and Conclusions

This is the difference between the education of horses and dogs or sea mammals: the manipulation of behavior for horses is all about the physical interaction between a human and an animal, while the training of other animals is based on verbal cues and signals. This brings me to consider that horse training could be defined in four dimensions, interacting with each other.

1) The classical knowledge of the masters brought us the ideas of balance, impulsion, obedience from the horse and lightness to the aids developed by the principle of “diminution of the aids” (see the previous article on lightness in the September/October issue).

2) The ethological study of the horse’s behavior, from the specific point of view of his interactions with the herd, confirmed the ideas of dominance and leadership that were already well understood by previous generations of trainers.

3) The science of behavior modification known as “operant conditioning” was started by B.F. Skinner and brilliantly demonstrated by Ed Bailey, who trained 300 species. In a conversation, Ed told me that he had not worked horses whose training he considered to be completely separate from all other species due to the physical rapport between horse and rider.

4) As for biomechanics and neurology of muscle activity, the gaits of the horse are the result of the movement of each leg, each determined by the activity of its muscles according to the neurological messages they receive. This means, in simple terms, that the asymmetry of movement (one front leg reaching further than the other, one hind leg engaging more or less, jerking upward or dragging its toe) can be attributed to an excess or a lack of muscle tone and the dysfunction of what is known as “the synchronicity of agonist/antagonist pairs” (for instance the biceps/triceps pair).

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All of these reflections brought me to some interesting conclusions:

▶︎ The statements of the old masters deserve to be examined in their context. Most modern science ends up proving the empirical conclusions of trainers who had spent 40 or 50 years training a multitude of horses to a high level. To be an effective trainer, we must read and reread the classical books to understand the principles that have been time tested and proven effective.

▶︎ This goes for the understanding of behavior: teaching a horse to move on the lunge line respects the most basic tenet of herd behavior: who creates and controls movement is the dominant one and the more precise the movement, the deeper the influence we gain over the horse’s mind through the control of his body. One big step forward in that progression is inherent to piaffe: it is the maximum mobility without forward movement, mixing calm and energy without force from the rider (dominant). Piaffe, when done correctly (see article on lightness in the previous issue) completely replaces the “fight or flee” reaction with a movement that offers the advantage of freeing completely the horse’s body and preparing him for collection in all the other gaits.

▶︎ Operant conditioning is the most intelligent form of teaching an animal by motivating his responses the right way (he gets to determine a rewarding outcome by performing the desired behavior). Baucher was a pioneer in the science of apprenticeship, saying: “Demand often, be satisfied with a little [progress], reward lavishly.”

▶︎ The relaxation of muscles that are too tight (from spasm) or the stimulation of the ones that are too lazy (from lack of tone), can correct a defective gesture by improving the range of motion and the timing of individual limbs. This in turn, can correct the horse’s gait, his posture and his balance. Better balance always leads to greater physical and emotional comfort and produces a positive effect on behavior. A relaxed horse will be much more willing to do what is asked of him than a tense horse who feels incapable of performing any movement in a symmetrical posture that will feel completely unnatural to him at first.

Those are the elements that must guide the train er, particularly in the early phase of the education, as the first rides have the most impact on the horse’s future behavior and cooperation with his rider. This cannot be done in a day, as it takes a month or so to get a horse physically organized to understand the job of carrying a rider, strengthen and supple his body, get rid of his most flagrant asymmetries, get him used to all the forms of contact that horsemanship is going to impose on him and transform innate reactions into predictable responses.

Endotapping

In 1992, I stumbled into the fact that repetitive, rapid, non-painful tapping would relax any horse in very short order. I developed that method into a systematic “school of the aids” that I named (and trademarked as) Endotapping, which is based on different rhythms of tapping. Progress is guided by the following principle: the horse first resists any contact by pushing against it or freezing, then once used to it, he ignores it for a moment. If the tapping continues, he shows all the signs of relaxation (lowering the head, relaxing the topline, slower breathing, chewing and licking, etc.). After that stage, single taps associated with forward requests at the walk (clucks) start to modify the horse’s gait (longer steps or quicker lift offs). It is those steps that help “reprogram” the horse’s movements. The horse learns to turn, start walking or trotting forward, rein back, step sideways, lengthen the stride, slow down the tempo, halt on a steady pressure of the stick on various parts of the body (under the neck, the back, etc.), relax on command and diagonalize the stride in walk. This work is a perfect preparation for starting a horse and can be done on a colt as young as three months. After that, regular lunging, desensitization to tack, long lining and eventually riding are greatly facilitated. When the horse knows how to relax on command, the backing process is both simplified and made safer.

I have seen many methods of starting horses in Europe, the U.S. and Australia, orchestrated by very talented people. I truly believe in the system I have developed for my horses, a combination of methods I learned from many “masters.” Horses stay sound and happy; riders are safe. These are always the most important things — the goals we must never lose sight of.