I like Claus Hempfling - saw one of his live demos - brilliant very calm and quiet with the horses, treated each as and individual and when the horse had got one little thing - even if it was only after 5mins, he finished on a good note and left it at that. I love classical dressage, the lippizaners are beautiful, andalusians are one of my fav breeds, I was lucky enough to get to ride a highly trained dressage andi stallion - I died and went to heaven!!
Can't stand Monty Roberts at all he really is a circus clown that puts on a fancy show and has money as the driving force not the horses at all!! He did a demo a while back and ran a 2yr old colt into the ground for 3hrs - a 2yr old should be out in the field playing and should not even be lunging let alone have someone on board, he ran the poor baby to exhaustion, as he did not want to look like he failed in front of an audience, then stuck a saddle on it and tah dah!!!
- most of his 'shows' are like that!
I hate to think of the long term affects the join up rubbish has on horses, they never mention if you try it on a dominant horse you're going to get killed!!! And don't even get me started on parelli - it's no better than a circus show, if you see the vids on the net on how his wife treats horses away from the camera you'd be horrified!!!! - they even had a horse load onto a moving trailer - wtf!!!! I went to 2 parelli demos, as I like to keep an open mind, and walked out on both I was that disgusted, I've bred horses for years and dealt with alot of youngsters/stallions etc and all it takes is calm common sense, time and patience, not whacking a horse in the face with a rope/carrot stick etc - which is just a regular stick with a huge price tag btw - to make it back up and all the other drivel they come up with to sell products/videos etc!! - sorry for the rant but they really do make me angry, I will give them one thing though they do have one hell of a marketing team that has put alot of notes in their bank, it targets people who have the rose tinted romantic illusion of being 'one' with their horse but don't actually know diddly sqaut about them so want a quick fix - that rope 'be nice halter' is about as kind as using barbed wire, I've seen a horse loose half it's face down to the bone to one of those cheese string contraptions, I've seen so many good horses end up at the knackers because people tried to 'train' horses this way I will be glad when the fad for these idiots is over!!!!!
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