Gerd Heuschmann – The Dressage War

A very special interview with Chris Hector

Gerd Heuschmann is a controversial figure in the world of dressage… at one stage it seems that the FEI dressage committee was planning to sue him for the footage of competition dressage (and warmup) on his hard hitting DVD, If Horses Could Speak, but at the same time more and more dressage enthusiasts are listening to the horse friendly message being spread by Gerd and a number of riders and trainers associated with the Xenophon association. So that was my first question:

Who is winning – the good guys or the bad guys?

“Klaus Balkenhol who is at the competitions every weekend tells me that the training area has improved a lot. We have a big discussions everywhere, so it’s in the mind of the people – this is something we have to think about. Even our German Equestrian Federation has reacted, I have an appointment with the new General Secretary, they want to talk to me. Okay, I can understand that they don’t like my DVD in all the points, especially the comments at the end – they think I don’t like competition at all, but this is not so, I took the positive examples also out of competition. But they are still open to discuss, they have asked me to do seminars, so next weekend I do a seminar with Christoph Hess at his son’s place, so I think it is a very positive time now, we bring things forward.”

With the changes in the FEI dressage committee, I think the judging panel for the Europeans this year is a better panel – it is good to see Eric Lette back, I think he is a horseman…

“Yes, but in my opinion we’ve got to change the invitation system, we have to create a different system that produces a very strong judges, and that no organizer, no competitor, has any influence to say this judge is good, this judge is bad. We need to have a pool of judges at different levels. At the lower level the local organizers say we need three judges here, and five judges there, and we have like a lottery system, ok, you go there, you go there… Then no-one knows who will come. You need to have a pool of people who you know are good enough – okay, we know you can have a good vet and a bad vet, you have good and not that good judges, but we must have a different system. We have a problem as long as people can choose and say if this judges is there, we will not come to the show! I don’t know of one sport that has a system like this.”

I thought that the judging at the Bundeschampionate last year was much better than it has been in the past…

“Yes they think more, they are aware that the public is more sensitive, and we will make it even more sensitive with our T-Shirts…”

T-shirts!?

“People say to me, what can we do? And I say, open your mouth. Criticism is good but don’t just talk to your neighbour, open you mouth. How can we do it? So we produced these t-shirts, and you can stand at the dressage arena, and if you don’t like it, turn around. I’m waiting for Aachen this year, because I am expecting a few hundred people wearing these shirts.”

What do we have to do to improve the situation?

“I think the first thing must be to get back our idols… the George Morris’s of dressage, people with principles and straight ideas, with the horse in the middle of the thinking and not the money and success. Parallel we have to work on educating our beginners, our normal riders.”

It is interesting that an elite rider like Isabell Werth is willing to discuss these matters with you?

“Unbelievable. There is no need for her to talk to the crazy veterinarian, why should she – she’s an Olympic winner, her stable is full, why should she take half a day to come here, sit and drink a cup of tea, and talk? This shows me that she is open and ready to discuss the subject. On the other hand, I have been in the United States quite often recently, and it is a very sad thing, there are some German trainers there who are training in a very bad way. I went to a seminar and a lady said ‘I go to a German trainer from Warendorf, you should know him, and he asked me to canter forty minutes around him with the horse’s nose on my leg, forty minutes… nice dressage trainer, famous in America.”

“You and your colleagues in the press, are becoming more critical. Mrs Pochammer from St Georg, she has an opinion, she was one of the first, but there are more journalists who are thinking about how to train horses in the correct way.”

I do feel uncomfortable when the horse friendly training group swings completely to the other side, and lines up with the ‘oh we are so beautiful and sensitive that we would never actually put our horses in a competition’ group’ – and when you watch a lot of them, their training is also very ugly…

“I always say, people don’t be dogmatic, I have to say it to you. There are some very special people like Phillipe Karl. I wasn’t so sure about him, but Mrs Sontag, who publishes Piaffe magazine, she made me go and see him. I was lucky, the top four or five trainers of his system were there, riding, and I didn’t trust my eyes, this was dressage, unbelievable – the whole day long. They can’t show me a fake for a whole day. They came in long rein, piaffe, but a real piaffe on the hindlegs, this was perfect dressage. Okay, Mrs Sontag went to a different place, with different riders, and it was not so good.”

Why can’t these horses come out and show it in the competition arena?

“This is the next thing. Mr Karl always says: I don’t want to have anything to do with the Federation, and if you go to competitions, then you can’t ride with me. I said to him if you are true and don’t lie to yourself, and if you want to help horses, you have to open your thinking and give people a chance to get something of your ideas. He is very special, he is the guy with these high hands but I went there for two days to study him, he has some very interesting ideas, if you could use some of his ideas then you could stop people from pulling. There is no need to pull – his way the horse starts chewing and is relaxed and the back is up. I hate this dogmatic dressage world. If you are a dressage rider from the Federation, you never would talk to Mr Karl, you would never talk to the riders of Iberian horses from Portugal. There are a few people who are doing a good job. Anja Beran who wrote Classical Schooling with the Horse in Mind, she is doing a good job, if I was a horse, this would be maybe my first choice to go to her stable. She can’t compete because her horses don’t have suspension, they don’t have medium, but these horses do a perfect piaffe, they are supple and they are very flexible.”

But do you think that is just technique – Hayley Beresford scored 74% at the Neumünster World Cup, riding a Lusitano horse…

“This is a different philosophy. In my opinion we have two major historical dressage roots. One is following the military tradition – the soldier wants to go from Berlin to St Petersburg, it needs to be fast. He wants to have a healthy horse, he wants a healthy arse and a healthy back, so he wants suspension, the horse trotting over the back forward. The others, coming from the Iberian tradition, they work with the cattle and at the weekend, they want to go to the bullfight. What do you need when you are in an arena with a bull, what do you want? You want a horse that is quick, that is flexible, but no suspension. Can you imagine a Weltmeyer with that big trot in front of a bull? You would be dead. They couldn’t afford suspension, if is a completely different idea. When they work with cattle, they need canter, stop, walk on a long rein. No need to have suspension in trot. This is another root.”

“Both philosophies come together at the end and you have a supple healthy horse, but different horses, in one root you have the hanging reins, the back down walking in trot, you don’t have suspension – it’s a different philosophy. Yet Mr von Niendorf showed that you can get suspension with these horses, if you ride them with the back up. But I don’t like it when the competition people – like you – just put them down, we should try to understand what they do, and talk to each other because there are very interesting aspects we can take from each other. I am sure the ideal thing is in the middle. You could have a nice horse with suspension, a very good looking horse and supple, and no need to pull…”

“The thing is that our dressage competition world could be something supple and nice, there is no need for the stiffness that we have. We have the wrong idea about contact: contact is misinterpreted from the basic to the top sport. We don’t have a good word in English for stellen – the lateral flexion in the poll, this is a must in a horse that is really over the back and supple – look at the big competitions, the horses are like a piece of wood, no lateral flexion. Since I visited Mr Karl and understood his philosophy about the poll and the chewing – the biomechanics – it all fell into place. We make them flex at the poll, and then when the back goes down, we push to get suspension, and it is out of a stiff back. Suppleness, this word doesn’t exist any more, it’s gone. If you read the HD12, the mother of our German Principles, then you find the flexing of the poll, you find the Baucher work for the mouth – Baucher is a person we have to think about, we don’t like him at all, but he has very interesting opinions about the contact question. It is wrong to say Baucher is 100% rubbish – because there are things there that we should talk about. In the end, we have to talk to each other, and you journalists are the people who make opinions – to open the minds or close them. I think people like you should work more on the communication between disciplines.”

“In November we have a big meeting – Philippe Karl meets me, in Verden in the big auction hall. You cannot imagine how many people want to see it. Maybe they think we will have a fight. What I will try to explain is that we have to watch carefully. He will bring some of his own horses, and he wants to have horses that he has never seen before, Warmbloods. There is no fear at all, he takes the risks, he is a really interesting guy. I don’t know if his system is good enough that everyone can use it to train their horse, because it’s a risk if you don’t have a perfect seat and you ride with the high hands, there can be a problem.”

We had something like this in Australia, we had a great master visit us several times, Nuno Oliveira, but some people who thought they were riding like him, just put a double bridle in the horse’s mouth, very sharp spurs, and sit in the middle of the horse’s back with the hands up, and they produce a false passage – very nice to sit on, you can sit up straight and pretend you are a classical master of the Baroque School, but it was bad for the horse, all strung out behind, not properly gymnasticised… that’s as bad at the Young Horse rider with the horse running in a Bundeschampionate trot.

“We shouldn’t compare the bad German riding with the bad Iberian riding, we should try to get the positive aspects of these philosophies. Before we start discussing we have to accept that there are two philosophies. The thing is that we think they are wrong, and they think we are wrong. Everybody talks about ‘dressage’ but dressage is not one thing – it depends on where it is coming from – what is the original idea. Many people try to mix it and they are not successful, the wrong mix can be dangerous…”

But surely there is a biomechanical bottom line, and you know this better than anyone, there is a structure of a horse, and there are only so many ways you can make this structure move from A to B in a way that is physically beneficial to the horse. I think the problem is when we start to say, oh there are many ways of dressage, is that the mechanics of the horse only allow certain ways of going, it is the structure of the horse that creates the principles…

“You are right but – and there is a but – the whole biomechanic we talk about, at the end, it is always about the back. Let’s try and make it easy, this is a summary of my new presentation which lasts three and a half hours, it grows all the time… but it is about the back. You remember the long back muscles, the two strong muscles. So the first idea is that good riding is to not have a stiff back, this is what we don’t like – a stiff back.”

“On the positive side, you have many different variations, you can have the good Portuguese/French school, those horses are trained with a loose back, the back has no positive tension, the back is hanging but not stiff, completely relaxed. They don’t have suspension so they walk in trot, the Old Masters called it ‘School Trot’, always with a pair of legs on the ground, no suspension phase, no need to have positive tension in the back. This is still good riding because the horse is not stiff, the horse is supple, chewing on the bit, the rider can have hanging reins. The next steps is maybe low level dressage, where you start to have positive tension in the back because you need a medium trot, and the higher you come up, the more you get positive tension, like a dancer – positive tension but not stiff.”

“So we have to look at the philosophy. That Iberian / French philosophy doesn’t need positive tension, but we do have a few basic similarities: to supple the back, to train the hindlegs, to supple the poll, make the horse chew… the chewing is the first step of relaxation of the short head and neck muscle system. If we close the mouth the horse cannot chew and you will never get the horse relaxed in the poll, never, no chance – you can make him flex, but not give. The horse should give – not that the rider takes. But there are so many things that we could improve in our system by looking at the good things in the French / Iberian system. It is not necessary to take their whole philosophy, just the things that are good, pick out the things such as lateral work in walk. In the old HD12 (the founding document of the modern German Principles) it was there, lateral work in walk, we took it out because we couldn’t see the sense in it, but it is so meaningful.”

“One of the problems here in Germany is that we have good riders but they get good results with these exciting show tactics, and this is why they do it. If we had judges who would say, No, the horse is not over the back, the horse is not supple, out – then I think some of the worst ones would be the first to change.”

“Recently I was visited by a cowboy from Montana. Roland was out of his own country for the first time, a great horseman, 62 years old, he has spent his life with his cattle and his horses. We went to a competition, he was wearing his big hat and people were looking at him, finally after looking for two and a half hours in the warm up and the competition arena, he came to me and said, these people don’t love their horses. This makes me think a lot. I am talking about biomechanics, and this is just one piece of the jigsaw, but these cowboys they don’t know anything about biomechanics, they are working on their feeling. He worked my horse on the ground, and at the end, he is doing the same thing, exactly the same thing as I do, which my biomechanical explanations, say that I ought do: what happens that makes lateral steps in walk? What happens to the back? What happens to the shoulders? What happens to the poll? He’s doing the same things, he is working with his rope and he says, now we open the poll, and he says, this brings the mind to the ground. I say, oh he stretches the upper muscle system and the neck… aah, at the end we recognize that we are both right. When the horse relaxes the muscles and starts chewing, his mind gets ‘to the ground’ – this is why we should talk more.”

“When I look at the question, what is classical dressage or better, classical riding, because for me, classical has nothing to do with the discipline. For me a classical rider is able to train his horse for what he wants to do, without damaging the horse’s body or mind. A good cowboy can be a classical rider, if he is a good cowboy…”

This interview first appeared in The Horse Magazine in August 2009