A Matter of Trust
Police Horse Training Builds Confidence for any Discipline By Kim MacMillan
years of selective breeding and improved management tech- niques, we have been unable to truly eliminate the strongly ingrained self-preservation mechanism in the horse. In order to bond with an equine partner, it boils down to that old adage: “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” Or better yet, “If you can’t beat them, learn to understand them, and then join them.” Warmbloods Today caught up with two sport horse owners
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who found police horse training to be the perfect path to a close, trusting relationship with their horses and they enthusi- astically shared what they had learned. The first is professional dressage rider, USEF ‘S’ dressage judge and Paralympian Robin Brueckmann from Summerfield, North Carolina. The second is an experienced adult amateur competitor, Kristi Crowe, from Valparaiso, Indiana, who has participated in a wide variety of activities over the years from hunter/jumper shows and driv- ing to competitive mounted orienteering and her local Porter County Sheriff’s Posse.
Robin’s Story Over the years Robin has developed a number of FEI dres- sage horses. Her first one was the Danish Warmblood geld- ing Bordeaux, nicknamed David, (by Gay Baron xx, out of Fie Skvlokke) whom she purchased as a four-year-old. “I did all the training through Grand Prix with him myself,” says Robin. “We always had a very close bond, because of all the time I spent with him throughout his training. David was very special to me; he was my first really talented horse.” They eventually began performing bridleless dressage
exhibitions at venues such as Dressage at Devon and many horse fairs. It was during the same time frame that she slipped on some ice and injured her right leg, which developed into reflex sympathetic dystrophy. Subsequently she developed paralysis in the leg. Because of this, she began to ride without stirrups. (In 2011 she had her leg amputated and now wears a prosthesis, allowing her to use stirrups again.)
omewhere around 3500 BC, daily life started to improve dramatically for humans after they learned how to domesticate the horse. Yet, even after thousands of
During a horse fair appearance with Bordeaux in 1997, an
incident occurred that really drove home the importance of Robin’s strong belief in exposing her horses to many different situations. “I did my own ‘bravery training’ with him, includ- ing tarps, umbrellas, deadfall branches and whatever I could think up. One day David and I were at Equine Affaire for exhi- bitions. We were on our way to a lunchtime exhibition and had to pass through the concession area full of people and on sloping macadam. David was, of course, bridleless. Two elephants came walking toward us. They were part of the Shrine Circus. David startled, but I told him it was all right, and he walked on, toward and past the elephants. I patted him and said, ‘What a brave horse you are!’ Some woman, seeing the encounter, said, ‘No, you are the brave one!’ What was I going to do? If he decided to bolt, I had nothing to stop him. He trusted me completely, and faced down those elephants for me. Good boy!” While Robin was conducting a clinic at Foothills Equestrian
Center near Hickory, North Carolina, she met retired police officer Bill Richey, who was also teaching at the farm that day. It wasn’t long before she had signed up to take her Trakehner Radetzky S (a 2001 gelding by Pyatt Charly out of Ronja by Mago xx, bred by Kaj Overgaard Jensen) through Bill’s National Mounted Police Services course in 2009. Radetzky, or Sasha as she calls him, had been her Paralympic partner the year before in Hong Kong. Robin says Sasha is a brilliantly talented horse but, even
though you might not see it from the way he performs, he is also inherently timid. She enjoyed the results of the mounted police training so much that she took him through the course two more times. “Sasha is much more self-assured now, after completing this course three times in addition to my daily confidence training with him. I am so happy to have found
TOP, left and right: Robin Brueckmann has taken her four-year- old Oldenburg mare Shequin, a.k.a. Queen, through a number of mounted police horse and confidence-building courses, as shown here in the crossing of a fire line and smoke. At right are Robin and Shequin in the dressage ring in 2015.
Warmbloods Today 31
High Time Photography
Karen Havis
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