“We aren’t in war anymore”.
When you look back at the history of the Vaquero, you can find where it split from a slow artful horsemanship to horses being pulled in and having to be broke immediately (and often abusively) because they were how humanity was able to survive.
Whether it was to take the kids to school, or plow the garden, hauling the family to another settlement or commonly - off to war.
Society entered a place where we no longer had the luxury of moving slowly and listening to the horse.
They were the great sacrifice, and we built our history on their backs.
And yet still today, in all of our comfort, we see colt-starting weekends celebrated, where flooding their systems and yanking them into submission is perfectly acceptable.
As if we don’t have the luxury to give them what they are owed.
When we look back at the history of classical dressage, we see incredible movements of high level riders and their horses and have endlessly chased that image.
But we forget that those horses were also war horses, and the riders, soldiers.
What they required of those horses was not in fact always biomechanically correct.
But the horses were safe and capable, and that was what mattered.
They were the great sacrifice, and we built our history on their backs.
And yet still today, we see people chasing these images of tight under necks and upper level movements before the horses are ready, as if we don’t have the time and luxury to do it slower and in the way the masters had wished they had the ability to…
We aren’t in war with them anymore.
And the horses no longer need to be sacrificed for humanity's sake.
