November 11th

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Rollkur and the blue tongue

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I've been meaning to write about this all week, but reading the exclusive in Horse and Hound about the controversy tipped me over the edge. For my non-horsy readers, rollkur is a training/warming up technique used by some dressage riders. It basically involves riding the horse with its jaw pulled in virtually to its chest, in order to increase suppleness. Patrik Kittel , a Swedish competitor in Odense was videoed riding his horse in this way. If you watch the video , you'll see the horse's tongue hanging out - blue. It takes a while before the rider notices this. When he does, he stops, puts the horse's tongue back in, and carries on. There are two things which bother me about this. Firstly, I am fully aware large sections of the dressage world, and some of its brighest stars, consider rollkur perfectly ok, but the FEI guidelines state this practice should only be for short periods, allowing the horse to rest. Patrick Kittel apparently rode the horse for two hou...
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Archibald, don't eat the bedclothes

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My friend Louise sent me this picture today. It's from a children's book with the rather wince-making title For The Wee Ones. I thought, when I read that (because I read the message before I looked at the picture) that the picture was going to be a typical winsome production from the school of artists who think (or who are paid to think) that the child is a thing sent from God and a blissful thing. They had obviously never met a child, and certainly not mine. I should have known Louise better. The artist responsible for Archibald, don't eat the bedclothes slipped this one past the editors. Just look at the poor, broken Mother Rabbit. She knows she has not the faintest chance of being listened to, and poor thing, she is stooped in the way of a mother to whom this is just the lastest in a long line of horror; with nothing good to come. And Archibald is obviously the spawn of the Devil. Just look at those eyes. He'll have the bed after he's finished the bedclothes...
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Vintage Riding Schools - Heather Hall

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I’m attempting to break what has been a bit of a blogging drought by writing a series about riding schools. If you took Pony Magazine in the 1970s and before, you might remember an occasional feature it did called Round the Riding Schools . The sort of riding school that got itself featured here taught you to ride the right way, with instructors who were the backbone of the British equestrian establishment. Some of the schools featured in the article were very large indeed; others were minute. What many of them have in common, despite their size, is that they no longer exist. As for the esteemed establishment that taught me to ride, I always hoped that it would feature, but it never did. It wasn’t on quite the same level that Pony Magazine establishments were. The instruction was variable to say the least. There was an ex-Army instructor called Ben, who didn’t last long after he made pupils stand on the ponies’ rumps and ride round facing backwards. Even in an earlier, less health...
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