Good morning this is Will Faerber from Art2Ride here with Kristen Balch for our second Q&A session. The question that came in is: Is dressage appropriate for gated horses?

I grew up in Kentucky where people raised Thoroughbreds but rode Tennessee Walkers and saddle bred horses. I grew up all around saddle bred horses and have retrained many of them over the years to be riding horses, dressage horses, jumpers and even some hunters in the hunt field. The first thing that you have to understand about gaited horses is you cannot have a gaited horse and do dressage because it won’t work. What gaiting horses means is to create artificial gaits not the natural three gaits. Dressage is all about perfecting the three natural gaits of the horse, that is why in correct dressage the cardinal rule in the trot for instance is the horse must always keep the diagonal pairs together, The horses legs should swing on the same diagonal as shown in the photo. The way you create a gaited horse is by hollowing it’s back and separating the diagonal pairs to create gaits that are unnatural to the horse. Obviously if that is the case you can’t have a horse that is both gaited and working correctly in dressage. When you get a horse to work over it’s back it will not gait anymore because you create a gaited horse by exaggerating the hollowing of it’s back and exaggerate the raising of it’s head, which is the absolute antithesis of what dressage is all about. That is why those horses often go lame and have a sway back at a very young age.

The person who invented saddle bred riding in New York City in Central Park, that is why they call it the park seat, went to Europe and thought he was imitating European Classical dressage. While he was trying to make a horse look up hill he was putting platform shoes on them, of course now they would be up hill. It was a silly way of trying to recreate something instead of taking the four years that it takes to create a horse correctly. So you can do one or the other, but you can’t gait a horse and do correct dressage on it because they are antithesis to one another. You gait the horse by hollowing it’s back .

Yes you can do dressage on any horse and it will improve any saddle bred. We have two or three students now, including our horse Zoolander, that have some saddle bred in their background. Zoolander is actually a Canadian Warmblood but that was part of his background. Understand that any horse can have correct gaits by getting them to lower and stretch into the contact and then you will see immediately when the back comes up that all those funny gaited movements are gone and the horse will swing it’s back. Remember that people created gaited horses to make it easy for them to sit on. When you gait a horse and you lower it’s back and hollow it like that, what is really happening is your taking away the moment of suspension in the trot. What a Tennessee Walker does for instance is they always have three legs on the ground. They are going very fast but they are picking up one leg off the ground and putting it back on the ground instead of springing off the ground like we want them to do. My father would always say to me when he saw a saddle bred “they will never make it to the next town on that horse”. That is true because the horse is wasting all it’s energy going up and down, like a car with no shock absorbers, making all the concussion go into it’s joints making it go lame very quickly.

Does that make sense? You can’t have both, so decide one or the other. We hope you decide correct dressage because your horse will live a lot longer, be a lot happier, have less colic and you will be able to ride it athletically. So once again you have to decide, if you want an arm chair go home and sit in your arm chair, if you want a horse, get it working through it’s back so it’s moving you up and you are experiencing riding rather than flattening your horse’s back and making it go along just so that you have no movement. You have to come up to the horse as well, that is what riding ought to be about to some degree.

This is Will Faerber and Kristen Balch and we will see you next time at Art2Ride, hope that helps!

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