Dear Kristina: When I speak of the horse raising the base of its neck, I am saying precisely what I mean. It is the BASE of the neck that needs to rise. When the BASE rises, the neck arches. Raising the BASE causes the horse to make what is called a “neck-telescoping gesture” – the same gesture he makes when you proffer a carrot and he smells it and wants it but you don’t give it to him immediately. His neck becomes long, arched, and beautiful, all in one moment and irrespective of how bad his previous training, muscular development, or muscle-use habits may have been. The instant a horse begins using his body correctly, he becomes just as beautiful as he was intended to be.
There are two well-recognized stages to this, which is fundamentally a change in the horse’s posture, i.e. the way he uses the chain of vertebrae which compose his spine. In the first stage, the horse is asked to go “long and low” or “round and down” or (I hear this phrase recently) he is asked to perform a “stretchy trot”. The old German term for this exercise was “showing the horse the way to the ground”. You tell him by means of your aids and your intention and mental picture, that what you want him to do is to raise and round his back, and when he does that you anticipate that he will make a neck-telescoping gesture. This actually does make the neck longer and therefore the distance from your hand to the bit also gets longer. So as you ask him to round up under the saddle, you expect and anticipate that he will want to arch and extend his neck and somewhat drop the level of his head, and you allow this, without losing the feel of his tongue, by allowing the neck-telescoping gesture to pull the reins through your fingers, much like a fisherman “playing” a fish on the end of the line. This is altogether different, mind you, from allowing a horse to yank the reins from your hands, or to pull hard or brace up. You are PLAYING him, and he will enjoy the feel of this. You are learning also to coordinate this “playing” with the aids of your legs, so that the one follows the other and the horse comes to understand perfectly what you want.
When this has become a good old game between the two of you, you begin using it as a warmup. Later in the arena session, you’ll shift to other exercises such as “expanding the circle”, leg-yielding, an building perfect figures of eight (i.e., the “8” is composed of two perfectly round circles conjoined at a single point). You’ll think about Nuno Oliviera’s admonition to remember that “every correctly ridden corner in the arena is a small moment of shoulder-in”, i.e. it is shoulder-fore, so that you never pass through a corner without bending the horse enough, or even a little more than enough. And you work in both directions, and a little more in whichever direction the horse seems least able to bend. And you remember that the change of bend in the center of a figure-8, and indeed every change of bend no matter where it occurs, means PRIMARILY that you are changing the untracking hind leg.
This is a description of the low school, or the beginning of training. As George Leonard points out in his book “Mastery”, however, living on the plateau – loving every moment of the time you spend doing what LOOK like elementary exercises, doing them perfectly, doing them over and over again in every conceivable combination so that they never become boring or in any way like drilling – when you live like this, you are actually working on the most advanced exercises. They are all the same exercises, but what happens betimes is that the horse evolves and develops; your relationship deepens; your coordination gets better and smoother; and the horse tunes into you more and more.
And when that has gone quite a long ways, you may then begin to think about elevating the head. To elevate the head is not to raise the poll, or I should say, not MERELY to raise the poll. One must NEVER “merely” raise the poll. Saddle seat trainers sometimes speak of “breaking the horse back at the base of the neck” as their first step in training, but that is because their entire philosophy of riding is the opposite of ours, vis., they expect and desire that the horse move with a stiff, hollow back. They are willing to sacrifice softness and suppleness, which we develop by living on the plateau, for height at the poll; because any time a horse goes with a hollow back, his ability to raise the POLL is enhanced. But we do not want the horse to raise the POLL; we want him to raise the base of his neck, and to arch his neck by means of this raising. When we speak of elevating the head, therefore, what we mean is that we will stack the middle and upper sections of his neck on top of the base. We will never raise the poll higher than is justified by the raising of the base. It is easy to make a mistake with this, and it’s OK if you make a mistake, because you may not be able to tell at first how high you can ask the horse to raise its poll without “losing” the base. The way to tell is by looking and feeling as to whether the base of the neck has fallen down, or is trying to fall down, or has ceased to try to rise. As soon as you feel this “dropping out”, the horse will be “above the bit” and you shall know thereby that you have gone too far. So the next time you ask, you don’t go that far. It is wise to let the horse tell you how high he can arch his neck, and instead of you “demanding” that he carry his head at some predetermined height, you let him show you how high he is comfotable going on Day One, and then thereafter you see each ride whether he can arch up a little bit higher.
In our next lecture, which is more or less “part two” on collection, I am going to show a bunch of great examples of horses trained by people who very well understand all of this, one of whom was Tom Bass, the great early-day Saddlebred and Saddle Seat trainer from Mexico, Missouri. Born a slave, Tom Bass succeeded through the height of the Jim Crow era and was able to compete directly against whites in horse shows when no other Black person would have been allowed to do so. And this was because he was head and shoulders better than the competition and everybody knew it. You will see every one of Tom Bass’s horses, which were trained to a very high level, raising the base of the neck, arching the neck, and having the very high poll up there because it is stacked upon a raised base, not because the head has merely been pulled up or back. See you next time in class. Cheers – Dr. Deb
