The thing about a good rider is that they make it look effortless. It takes a lot of skill and experience and some good coaching to get there.
Shatner is using his seat to cue the horse. How he shifts his weight, whether he follows the horse with his pelvis and core muscles, or resists, can all cue the horse to go faster or slower. The aids are subtle. I suspect too, that he is riding a very well schooled, smooth gaited horse, but he is a nice, quiet rider.
Roy Moore is painful to watch. Heavy handed on the reins, unbalanced, bad position, bounces, rather than follows the movement of his horse…
Brain stall - who just started taking dressage lessons after ten years out of the saddle. I don’t remember sitting trot being so freaking hard.
Late to the party here, but he doesn’t know how to ride. He can barely sit on the horse. That poor thing is a saint and should have dumped his ass in front of the cameras. The bridle doesn’t fit, I’m betting the saddle doesn’t either.
That little beast he’s on is gaited, as in a Tennessee Walker or Racking horse of some kind. They are known for smooth, easy to ride gaits. Here’s a random video I cribbed showing what a good rider on a nice gaited horse SHOULD look like:
That was a wonderful horse with the smoothest gaits known. A three-year-old child could have ridden better than he did. Guy couldn’t manage a rocking horse.
doorhinge, I don’t know much about horses, but one thing I do know is that the reason that many urban police forces still use horses is because they’re really good with crowds. This does not seem consistent with what you’re saying.
That is so cool. I’ve been out of it for about as long, but I still have a garage full of tack. Five saddles, no horse! :rolleyes: It’s just too expensive around here for a good facility. We plan to move in a few years so I’m keeping all my stuff in the hope that I’ll be horseless no longer.
All I know is that Sassy was a magazine aimed at teen girls. The kind of mag a guy with a thing for teen girls might peruse. A bit too much of a coincidence.
Police horses are screened from a much larger pool of horses. Police horses are unusually calm, not freaking out over things like loud noises, screaming people, fire, traffic, and small bits of paper or leaves blowing in the breeze. They are to normal horses what seeing eye dogs are to normal dogs - unusually intelligent, trainable, and resilient.
Horses range from incredibly high-strung and skittish to, well, police horses. Most tend to bunch up closer to “scared” than “calm”, but they do occupy the full range.
Also, police horses are carefully desensitized to what would cause horses to react with fear by being exposed to things like traffic, noise, people, and loud noises like gunshots. The animal learns that these things are not immediate threats to life and limb, and combined with a good match of partner, the horse is unusually well-adjusted to city life and, again, takes a lot of cues off the rider. A well trained horse matched with a rider the horse trusts will do things that normally would scare the tail off a horse. A combination of all of the above means that police horses are good with crowds.
Horses also are very hard for an angry crowd to, for example, turn over because, unlike a squad car, the horse will resist such treatment. This makes them good in riot situations.
You mean that crowds are impressed by them so that they’re effective with crowds? I’d believe that. But not every horse can be a police horse. They’re specifically trained for their job and even with the training, some horses don’t make the cut.
I haven’t rode for at least 20 years (kidney stone and saddle galls killed me on the last 6 hour trail ride) and before that rode mostly bareback/saddle blanket but even I was agog watching Moore ride.
It looked like he was water skiing the way his stirrups were way out front.
I will admit to the time my oldest sister let me saddle one of her horses at age 16 (so 10 years since I had rode anything besides a dirtbike or bicycle) and, while I managed to actually do it right, a half mile away the saddle slipped and my nephew and I hung upside down for about 12s before hitting the gravel. Horse was a bloater. My sister blamed herself because 1) she knew that and 2) she should have checked. We were really lucky this was a very calm mare who just stood there and craned her neck back at us. I think she was laughing on the inside.
I love looking at her horses but between the dogs and cats no way can I afford more vet bills
Having been raised around horses all my life, and just retired after 24 years as an officer of the MN Horse Council, it was just painful to watch that video.
We call that ‘using the reins to hold yourself on the horse’.
The hands stretched out wide and pulling in both directions at once – awful. Indicative of a really poor posture & control of the riders’ own body on the horse. In a lesson, we’d take him off that horse and put him on a steady old lesson horse, and pony him along (no reins) until he was able to maintain some semblance of a seat.
The bridle is poorly adjusted – throatlatch way too tight. And from other pictures, seems like that’s the way he wants it. Probably because he drags so hard on the reins that the whole bridle would pull down off the horses’ head if it was adjusted the proper way.
That poor horse is a saint for putting up with him.
Also, why is he riding a pinto? Don’t Leviticus 19 and Deuteronomy 22:10 forbid such ‘color mixing’ for a Bible believer like him?
If Sassy were the kind of horse that doesn’t like being around a crowd - then that would be another proof of Moore’s lousy horsemanship, for riding her into a crowd and putting her in a lousy position. It’s the rider’s responsibility to be the brains of the partnership and look out for his horse. Moore deliberately chose to put her there. If she was upset, that’s on him.
I agree with other here, that she’s far too good for him.
That probably falls under the other cherry picking laws or “We don’t follow the Old Testaments (because that is for the … Jews, we only follow the New Testaments”).
(But don’t remind them that Christianity and Islam come from Judaism.)
I wish there was some way to report this as animal abuse ! I was hoping he was dumped too but the poor horse would of had been whipped to death by the jackass !
I wish there was some way to report this as animal abuse ! I was hoping he was dumped too but the poor horse would of had been whipped to death by the jackass !