Charlotte Dujardin: A Thoughtful Response

Editor’s Note: Best Horse Practices Summit presenter Katrin Silva grew up riding dressage in Germany before moving to the United States at age 19 to learn to ride Western. She’s been riding both disciplines for the last 20 years and is a regular guest columnist for Cayuse Communications. The author of Dressage for All of Us: How to Help Any Horse Become a Happier, More Responsive Riding Partner and the forthcoming Ride with Feel: A Guide for the Rest of Us lives in New Mexico where she works with dressage and Western clients.

Visit her blog here.

Katrin Silva writes:

Yes, I have seen the video of Charlotte Dujardin, arguably the world’s best dressage rider, whipping a student’s horse during a lesson. Yes, it is disturbing – especially because of the casual attitude it reveals about using the whip with force and gusto, again and again and again.

This is no big deal for Charlotte, who keeps whipping, even when the horse clearly does not understand what his response is supposed to be. It’s no big deal for the person filming, either. She is chuckling, sounding amused at the sight.

And, sadly, it’s not even a big deal to the horse, who is held tight in front and whipped on the hind end at the same time, which gives him nowhere to go. Most horses in my program would rear or bolt or buck if I treated them like this. I would not blame them. This horse kicks out a few times, then looks resigned. For him, pain and confusion are normal facts of life. This is just how things are.

Using the whip from the ground to help a horse figure out piaffe or other collected movements has a long tradition in dressage. It is not automatically abuse. The whip can be handled, like any tool, lightly, with tact and finesse. But here, the whip is used to cause pain. Here, the whip is used because Charlotte is frustrated with a horse who does not do what she expects of him, even though he does not know what she expects of him.

No, it is not acceptable.

No, it is not excusable.

Yes, Charlotte should have stopped using the whip and thought about why the horse resisted. Yes, the student riding the horse could have spoken up right then.

Yes, any of the people watching the lesson should have and could have stopped what was going on.

The bigger question becomes: Why didn’t they?

Charlotte Dujardin does not exist in a vacuum. Abusive practices in equestrian sports are part of a larger pattern in the horse industry. People who abuse horses include many respected trainers and competitors at the highest level. They are not just “a few bad apples.”  They are part of a culture that goes beyond Charlotte Dujardin, beyond Andreas Helgstrand, beyond dressage, beyond any particular discipline.

I’ve seen these types of training practices in Western show horses, in jumpers, in gaited horses. They are often considered normal, standard ways of making a horse do certain things or move a certain way – and the trainers who practice them pass them along to their students and assistants. When I was 19, the age of Charlotte’s student in this video, I worked for a well-respected trainer who had won multiple AQHA World Championships but used extremely abusive methods, like yanking on a horse’s head with a thin twisted-wire bit or raking their sides with rock grinder spurs.

I watched horses suffer. I participated in making them suffer. I’m not proud of this, but I believed what I was told: If I wanted to make it in the horse world, I needed to toughen up and play the game.

Thank goodness, I eventually walked away.

Thank goodness, I found other, better, role models. I was lucky. I could easily have ended up on the dark side of the equestrian universe.

Abusive trainers could not continue to do what they do without the network of enablers and condoners of their abusive practices: judges who reward spectacular movement over correct riding, students who believe questioning their coach is a sign of disrespect, professional riders and grooms afraid of losing their jobs, owners who like to brag about winning and threaten to take horses away from trainers who don’t win, breeders who like to sell their prospects for maximum amounts of money, spectators who gush over flashy performances on tense, anxious horses.

Do we condemn them all?

Do we cancel everyone who has ever contributed to abusive practices with any horse?

What good would that do?

Do we want to point fingers, accuse, blame, and feel self-righteous for a nanosecond, or do we want real, lasting change in the horse industry?

Here is what we need to do:

We need to change the culture around equestrian competition by modeling and supporting fairness to horses.

We need to change traditions (which does not happen overnight).

We need to have honest, industry-wide conversations about what abuse is and what it is not – and we need to develop clear guidelines around it.

We need to train our eyes to signs of tension and stress in a horse, instead of mistaking them for brilliance or collection.

We need to, as we say in German – Kehr vor der eigenen Tür – sweep outside our own front doors before pointing to the neighbors’ porch. We need to acknowledge our own lapses of judgment, our own moments of frustration with horses, our own shortcomings, our own misguided allegiance to traditions that don’t serve the horses’ best interest. If we have been a part of the horse world for long enough, we have done things we regret later, just like Charlotte Dujardin. She acknowledges this and is learning from her mistakes. We should do the same. No one is perfect.

Here is what we don’t need to do:

We don’t need to add more shame and judgment to this world. There is already too much of it going around.