Document type: article published on the France 3 Normandie
Author: Marie Lorillec
Preview: Daniel Reyssat runs a stable in Normandy and offers "relationship therapy" between riders and their mounts. In his book "Peut-on encore monter à cheval?" (Can we still ride horses?), he questions our relationships with horses and takes a look at what needs to change to make them more ethical.
The sport with the third highest number of licenced practitioners in France, after soccer and tennis, horse-riding is sometimes seen as elitist and harsh on animals, and regularly attracts its share of criticism. Cases of abuse at top level, such as during the Olympic Games in Paris and Tokyo in 2020, have raised questions about the very legitimacy of the sport itself. In Peut-on encore monter à cheval?, Normandy horseman Daniel Reyssat sets out to answer this question by proposing to rebuild, without infllicting pain and with the animal's consent, the relationship between humankind and its most noble conquest.
D.Reyssat: I've been a horseman for a number of years. I did a lot of competitions, I played horse-ball for 25 years. And I was known for having a rather gentle riding style. During the French championships, I caused my mare to have a spur injury, and from then on it was as if I'd had an electric shock. How could I have injured her just to win a match, when everyone knew I was gentle on my horses? I wanted to take a closer look at the subject of violence in dressage, the use of pain in dressage. To see if we could do things differently. I have a stable where people bring horses to live on my premises and look after them themselves. I give lessons to improve the rider-horse relationship. And then I have another part of the business where people bring their horses to me, either for breaking in (getting the horse to accept the saddle, the rider, to understand basic commands, NdR), or to rebalance their relationship when things aren't going well. People call it behavioral therapy, but I'm really more into relationship therapy. I don't retrain the horse in its behavior, because the horse just reacts like a horse. The problem arises when you forget that it's a horse and just use it as a tool. In fact, then, there's no longer any relationship; you use physical constraints to impose obedience. If you want to establish a relationship of trust, you have to obtain the horse's consent. This takes more time, but the more time you take, the more time you gain.
That's what we usually say. Once the horse trusts you, you can ask a lot more of it than if it doesn't want to respond. And at the same time, it's a real paradigm shift.
What's important is what you want to achieve with the horse. Maybe that's the problem. If you want your horse to perform better and better, being gentle isn't enough. In competition, you always want more. The aim of competition is to be better than the other horses. It's not about riding cleanly, it's not about having a happy horse. It's not about having a horse that's cooperative, it's about having a horse that's better than the others, that jumps faster, harder, often with a little more stress. In my book, I've looked at our everyday practices in leisure and sport riding, things we do that we think are good, but which aren't. I wasn't at all interested in looking at people who commit major abuses, which we are all aware of in the horse world. You have to combat major abuses, of course, but that isn't what I wanted to say. I really look at what made me, as a rider who thought he was being gentle, hurt my mare? Riders need to know the history of how we have gained control over horses. I explain this in the first part of the book. In a nutshell, we gained control over horses by controlling their housing, feed and reproduction. In this way, we made them dependent on us. For them to be well, we need to satisfy their basic needs, of which there are three: 1/ horses need to be able to move around freely 24 hours a day, 2/ they need to be able to feed whenever they want, mainly on grass, 3/ they need to be able to socialize 24 hours a day. If we can guarantee these three basic needs, we're doing well. Yes, we use these needs to motivate them to work. Horses are very happy to be fed. When a horse lives in a stall, going to work allows it to move around (a free-ranging horse walks an average of 10 km a day, while in a stall, it walks 2 km a day). And since the horse is all alone in its stall, it's happy to interact with the rider. When a horse's basic needs are taken care of, you have to make more of an effort to get them interested in people. If you want to build a real relationship, you put yourself in a bit of a bind; in fact, you deprive yourself of the means to control the horse. You really have to spend a lot of time with a horse, time doing nothing - horses love to spend time doing nothing. We have to try to focus on our goals. The relationship itself must be the main goal.
It's customary to make horses work by using negative reinforcement: you create a hindrance which you remove when the horse does what you want. The problem is that, if the horse still doesn't do what you ask, how far do you go along the scale from discomfort to pain in order to assert your will? The alternative is positive reinforcement (if the does what you ask, it wins itself a treat). It takes longer, but it's effective. Most of the people who come to see me are already committed, but some have just been advised to come by somebody else, and I try to get them to open their minds a little. I remember a show jumping professional who had a great horse, but the horse didn't want to jump over bars anymore. So we spent some time with the horse free in the work area. I asked the rider to attract his horse's attention, so that it would follow him, walking and running. And in the end it's the rider who runs and jumps the obstacle running with the horse following him. People know who they've come to consult and how we're going to work together.
