Very interesting! Thank you for sharing. Propaganda angle aside, this is the most educational historical documentation of equstrian sports you can watch. Makes it easy to understand the HDV12 German Cavalry Manual for Training Horse and Rider.
It's interesting to watch how eventing has evolved since those days, as well as the treatment of the horses by the riders. On behalf of these riders, I should say that they were very good horsemen who mastered their speciality very well. If you look at the Dressage table of the 1936 event competition, you'll find out it was far more demanding than it is nowadays. So it wasn't just tough riding as shown in this footage, which was common in military cavalry training.
Yes. And the training methodology (explicitly making the horse's welfare the number one priority) is recorded in the HDV12 German Cavalry Manual (amazon or HorseHaus.com).
but some quite ugly impressions: Relentlessly whipping the horses during finish, "sawing" with the bit in the horses' mouths... one military jump... horrible.
I’m LOVING all the dropped nosebands! And correctly fitted too! Maybe I’m aging myself, but I miss the days when we knew how (and why) to fit a dropped noseband. A brief course: The dropped noseband is NEVER fitted more tightly than necessary to keep it below the bit. Its function is NOT to crank the horse’s mouth shut, but to stabilize the relationship between the bit and the bars of the jaw by holding the bit closer to the tongue, and preventing excessive movement of it. The dropped noseband is a translational aid. It conveys some of the force of the bit onto the cartilage of the nose, conveying the message, “Give here too.” Wish shouting it from the rooftops would help…but alas, non.
HOWEVER: The needless use of the bat. One can see these horses (here depicted) are full of forward JOY in their going; ears forward, eyes hunting for the next fence. Why the bat? The hell is WRONG with people?
In fact. But is it today very much better? I don't want to excuse the cruelty at that times with my statement. But have the people learned? I noticed 'dog collars' which give dogs electrical shocks if they bark not long ago.
Yes, historically horses were whipped. Not just in sports, everywhere. In carriages, in stalls, races, in ag work. A whip was not considered a cruelty unless there were marks. Then, something interesting happened - this visible act of beating was replaced with much more enduring and more effective way of subduing horses to the human will: the rollkur and the pressure/release techniques with no ability to escape (e.g. in round pens). No whip, just a lot of terror and pain till the horse gives up. There. Trained.
