REGULAR FEATURE
TC Making Contact
A Connection with the Whole Horse by Kim Roe
Kim Roe was raised on a horse ranch in California. Before deciding to pursue dressage seriously, Kim trained and competed working cow horses, hunters/jumpers, reiners, trail horses, and event horses. In 1982 she moved to Washington State where she trains both rid- ers and horses for USDF dressage shows and serves as the coach for the Skagit Valley Pony Club. She also trains horses and riders from different disciplines who want to use the fundamentals of dressage to improve and refi ne their horse’s training. She works out of her Blue Gate Farm in Acme, Washington. Contact Kim at
bluegatefarm@yahoo.com.
that everyone wants their horse to be “rounder,” softer in the bridle, or quieter in the head and neck. These training problems lead us to the issues of contact, acceptance of the bit, and connection. Let’s fi rst defi ne contact, acceptance of the bit,
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and connection. Contact is just touching the bit, the reins following the horse’s head without bouncing or hanging slack.
Contact can
be passive or active. A passive contact is like putting your hand on the bridge of your horse’s nose. He shouldn’t pull or push your hand away or try to bite you. The hand is there if and when you need to tell your horse something. At the moment of a request, your contact becomes “active.” Connection is having
not only control of the horse’s face but his entire body. We connect our horse from his hind legs to our hands. In connec- tion we receive the suppleness, straightness, and impulsion created in the horse’s hind legs into the palms of our hands, and then re-direct all that power back into our horse’s body. It is a lovely feeling, very much like dancing with a partner that neither drags us around or lags behind us, but stays right with us. It takes a certain amount of trust for a horse
to allow us to “touch his face,” and even more for them to let us into their mouths in the form of a bit. They use their heads and necks for balance and for defense. This is why when we start riding our horses on contact, we may begin to have problems. The horse might pull, or curl his
20 March 2012 The Northwest Horse Source
hen I ask a new student how I can help them with their horse, I can almost always count on the answer: It seems
nose toward his chest, or fl ing his head about. We need to progress slowly and considerately during this time of training, keeping with the training scale and a systematic progression. We must avoid pulling, sawing, yanking, or
“shaping the neck.” The neck of the horse bends and fl exes as a response to being correctly ridden forward and by riding exercises that supple the horse’s entire body. Connection is never putting a “headset” on a horse. Horses accept the bit when they understand that they don’t need to fear it. If you hurt your horse’s mouth,
they
Swedish Warmblood mare Bakerview Pearl, owned by Debbie Palmblad and ridden by Kim Roe demonstrates a collected connection on a short rein.
will not accept the bit! A correct contact is dependent on the ability of the rider. If the rider is stiff, bouncing or losing her balance, she is not yet ready to ride on the contact. The rider must have an independent seat and good control over her arms. A straight line must be maintained from the rider’s elbow to the horse’s bit, and she must be able to use her legs and seat to
communicate with her horse. I tell my students that it takes about 2 years of riding before they will be able to keep a quiet, elastic contact. In training a horse to accept the bit, we fi rst
must train him to listen to our seat and legs until we can ride on a loose rein. Only then is the horse ready to accept passive contact. As the horse learns to accept the weight of the rider, the saddle, the girth and the rider’s leg, he needs to learn to accept a passive contact. This step can take minutes, hours, and even years depending on the horse. I know pretty quickly if a horse will make a good dressage horse by how quickly he
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Trainer’s Corner
PHOTO: COURTESY OF KIM ROE
PHOTO: PHOTOS BY SCARLETT
PHOTO: CAROLYNN BUNCH PHOTOGRAPHY
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