The Blood Rule

Horses, the Olympics, and the future of equestrian sports

Aug 01, 2024

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I have a history of giving impromptu speeches from the pulpit of my riding arena. The recent scandal involving British dressage mega-star Charlotte Dujardin is too important for me to ignore.

Equine professionals are afraid to speak out when damaging incidents strike our industry. For many, stating their opinion could be career-ending. I am lucky to work with horses and be able to speak my mind. My clients value the welfare of the horse and I do not have remaining ties with the trainers who shaped me.

Bear with me for a moment as I get on my high horse.

I might need a mounting block.

As always, my standard disclaimer applies. I work alongside many talented horse pros and my views do not necessarily reflect their beliefs. My ideas blossom all by my onesie.

white horse running on grass field — Photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash

How do we define abuse?

I made the conscious decision to stop competing horses over a decade ago. My farm doesn’t travel out to horse shows. We stay home on the weekends. My riders will never be pressured to buy a horse or spend a small fortune on a fancy outfit. But my roots run deep in the competitive horse world. It’s what made me, good or ill, who I am today. Most of my program exists as a counter-balance to the moral questions I discovered while growing up and launching a farm in the traditional equestrian structure.

My public apology to the horses was late coming. I wrote it earlier this month and you can read or listen to it here.

The recent equestrian Olympic quandary happened when a video and allegations of abuse surfaced showing Charlotte Dujardin repeatedly whipping a horse in a private lesson. The information caused her immediate suspension by the governing body of equestrian sport, the Fédération Equestre Internationale (FEI), and her subsequent withdrawal from the Olympic team just as she and her horse were preparing to settle into France for the Games.

Dujardin is a household name for horsey people with a reach that crosses boundaries of disciplines in a way that seldom happens in the myopic tribalism of, what many call, an elite sport. She was on her way to being the most medaled female Olympian in British history and she comes from a modest start.

The news of her departure was originally broadcasted without video evidence.

I was curious to know how the information was being generally received so I waded knee-deep in the swamp of online commentary. When a short video clip of Dujardin on the ground repeatedly snapping a lunge whip toward, and against, the legs of a horse being ridden by a face-blurred minor surfaced, I did not watch it right away.

I spent most of my life riding with trainers whose methods involved aggressive pressure. My reluctance to watch the clip mystified me. I wasn’t shocked or emotionally involved with the details of Dujardin’s fall from grace. It was something else, something more akin to the Uncanny Valley revulsion I feel when graphic war footage is leaked. The thought of watching the video turned my stomach.

Everyone at my farm asked if I had watched the video. They asked for my opinion. And I gave my opinion numerous times before I caved and actually watched the clip.

The grainy footage is shot in a pristine, covered riding arena. A teenager is mounted on a large warmblood horse. Dujardin is on the ground snapping a long, lunge whip over and over. There are blows aimed at the front of the horse and blows aimed behind. We’re not given details of what exercise she intends the horse to complete, but whether she is asking for more expression in the horse’s movement or more forward movement — her blows are erratic and poorly timed. They don’t achieve anything.

Dujardin’s face is placid. The whip is aggressively lazy as if she has far better things to do than teach this lesson to someone who has been given a rare chance to ride with one of the great dressage teachers of our time.

Often cited as The Blood Rule:
5.6.1. If the Judge at C suspects fresh blood anywhere on the Horse during the test, they will stop the Horse to check for blood. If the Horse shows fresh blood, it will be eliminated. The elimination is final. If the Judge through examination clarifies that the Horse has no fresh blood, the Horse may resume and finish its test.
-FEI Dressage Rule Book

I store my faith in horses

The church that raised me was organized like a cult. Its structure was underpinned by an atmosphere of fear.

It’s been a long time since my body and mind were placed in a situation where they were opposed and frozen into compliance when given a task. I’ve had to do some things that I don’t enjoy: public speaking, paying taxes, picking up litter from the road that rings the woods at the farm exit (just kidding, that job is fun, filled with a sense of completion and it gives me times to talk to the trees along the route).

But bracing against a task that comes with zero choice? That is rare in my life these days.

As a child, bracing was the norm and not in the way that all children fuss about having to clean their rooms. The religious environment that formed me by giving me an example of how I DID NOT want to live my life, was sewn together by the brutality of a populace that was terrified of eternal damnation. The adults projected their fears with paddles and violence dressed in righteous care. They believed they were The Elect and the only ones worthy of the Kingdom of Heaven. Everyone else, including the children, had to prove their worth.

For me that was endless memorization and recitation, constant questioning at school and church with queries that were deep enough to be a thesis. No pants for the girls, no makeup, no dancing, no movies — we were expected to be pure and innocent and not talk back.

I’d learned how to game the system and hide my real self beneath a facade of shame, so when I began taking horseback riding lessons when I was nine years old, I didn’t know adults could behave any differently. My instructors spoke the only language I knew — fear, pressure, and physical consequences for poor performance.

Once I was chased around the barn with a syringe filled with horse tranquilizer because I hadn’t moved my brush box from the hallway. I’ve had needles thrown at me because drugging the horse was the rule not the exception, and if I showed hesitation at any action required of me when I was on top of the horse, I had the assurance that I wouldn’t only have to eventually do the thing I feared, but that I would be asked to do more to teach me a lesson.

It would take me decades to remove this foundation of force in my own interactions with the horse — my fear-based response of lashing out — and it was a process of removal that was like separating toxic molecules from a liquid, a long, impossible process of refinement.

When I watch the video of Dujardin and her student and the horse, I don’t see abuse. I see a snapshot of systemic subjugation. I see the dregs of tyranny that have collected for centuries in the relatively undercover universe of the horse world.

It’s always been there, happening in plain site for the viewers with their cameras at the edge of the arena. When we’re dazzled by the promise of greatness, it’s difficult to see that anything is wrong.

“The horse welfare debate within equestrian sport is mainly centered around human interests. How can we keep exploiting horses for sport without being seen by the outside world as animal abusers? That discussion needs turning upside down if we are really being serious about putting horse welfare first.”
-from a Psychology Today interview with Julie Taylor, author of I Can’t Watch Anymore: The case for dropping equestrian from the Olympic Games: An open letter to the International Olympic Committee

Blundering Blindfolded

I have a clear image in my head of the moment I decided to create a different path for myself as a professional horseman, one that took a very long time to realize and alter. It’s not something that I just noticed and changed. The habit of doing harsh things with horses because they’ve always been done that way is hard to break. I’ll be making amends the rest of my life for the damage I’ve done unknowingly and in ignorance.

Like blundering around blindfolded in a foreign room, I still work daily to de-code my conditioning.

In my memory, I hold sweaty reins in my hand as I stand at the sliding gate of a riding arena filled with jump stands, poles, and smooth, grey sand. A horse, recently arrived from Europe, stands shaking and blowing his breath.

The farm rests at the base of a green mountain of untouched hardwood trees and rich springs dripping pure water. The farm is a pristine enclosure of privilege and pain.

The shaking horse is the mount I was given to ride that day, but as I swung my leg over the saddle, the horse reacted violently and reared.

My trainer pushed me to keep going.

I felt the horse’s energy build beneath me, ready to react to my slightest touch.

And, I did the unthinkable. I dismounted and handed the reins to my trainer. I told him I would not do it. I wouldn’t push this horse.

The trainer was astonished that I would say no and even more so as I told him that the horse scared me and I didn’t feel comfortable riding him.

The trainer, frustrated, sent me away to take one of the seasoned horses out into the woods for a walk. We were gone for an hour or more, with me getting my nerves back in order through the calm movement of the familiar horse beneath me. The relaxed horse offered me a form of communication that made sense. We wandered through apple orchards and down shadowy paths that smelled of pine and exactness.

In my memory, when I return from the woods, I find the new horse shaking and breathing raggedly in the arena with my trainer after having been run continuously in punishment for my refusal. French lunging, or free-lunging to the less pretentious, is used to deplete the horse’s reserves of energy until they become more biddable, more ridable, more tame. Until they submit to what is being asked.

There isn’t a light bulb going off in my twenty-something brain that says it is wrong for me to mount a horse I don’t know without spending some time understanding him. I trust my trainer implicitly.

I have trusted my trainers completely.

Until I didn’t.

What changed my point of view in this instance was the action of cause and effect. I realized that the consequences of my consent meant punishment for the horse in the system that I had chosen to work within. I employed my ability to choose and my choice changed the outcome for another creature. To play the horse game at the highest level, I would have to sacrifice my consent or the horse’s. Consent could not exist simultaneously in this world. One of us would have to give.

Is it not possible to eat me without insisting that I sing praises of my devourer?
-Dostoevsky

Whips not included

As I watched the video of Dujardin whipping a horse and rider into submission. I wasn’t shocked at what I saw because I know that force is commonplace in the competitive horse world. It’s the price of the game.

The new question the horse industry is asking should have been asked a long time ago, but better late than never:

Is it possible to compete horses at the level the modern world requires without resorting to abuse?

My answer: No, it is not.

The stakes are too high. The money is too great. The competition is too tight. When I first started out as a horse pro, an average kid could buy an average horse for $5k and go forth and ribbon at a horse show. The starting price is now $20-30k. When clients began buying show horses for their kids and putting them on their home equity loans, I changed tactics and suggested they put those dollars into a college fund instead.

Then I stopped selling horses entirely.

So much has changed in so short a period of time.

One of my riders is a vaulter, meaning she studies an old art that can be traced back to the bull leaping of ancient Greece. It’s like doing gymnastics on a moving horse. She travels all over the US doing this alongside world-class trainers who care deeply about the welfare of their horses. Vaulting horses are rare and their healthy partnership with humans is essential to the work.

Returning from a vaulting competition she told me about sneaking away to watch another horse show happening simultaneously at the same show grounds during her event. She described the riders in this other discipline as looking “hunchbacked” and the horses’ legs moving in big, extravagant patterns.

I told her that she had witnessed either Tennessee Walkers or Saddlebreds. My earliest lessons were on these gaited horses, a discipline that grew out of the horses preferred by plantation owners in the south and carriage horses with high knee action.

Gaited horses move smoothly without human interference, but with things never being enough and bigger-faster-harder being the unspoken motto in any chest-bumping pool of adrenaline — gaited horse trainers developed a bag of tricks to exaggerate the horse’s movement.

Animal welfare acts passed in the 1970s did little to eradicate the practice of “soring,” where caustic chemicals, weighted shoes, chains, and slicing a horse's hooves to the quick are used in order to force the horses to raise their legs higher. As animal rights groups became outspoken about damning the practice, the gaited horse industries gave a show of self-policing. Numbing agents are sometimes used to hide the effects of soring from the ring stewards at horse shows.

In reality, what happened is no one hears about gaited horse shows anymore. They’re rarely advertised. If you know, you know. And a savvy equestrian like my student wasn’t aware of horses that moved in this way or the practices that create the motions. The pain inflicted on some gaited horses is illegal, and yet it still goes on.

This is what happens when portions of the horse industry are shamed and canceled into the shadows. They don’t go away. They hide. They become more exclusive.

Judgment and shame will not revolutionize horse sport. Witch hunts like what Dujardin is experiencing right now will not bring lasting change. Shame is a curious animal. Its teeth grow longer when exposed to light.

To create a path that leads us away from force and pressure, trainers and clients have to lead the way by changing their expectations. We have to be okay with less fancy movement. We have to be okay with things taking longer. As the world teaches mindfulness and simplicity as the antidotes to stress, we have to apply those same concepts to our work with the horses.

All rights to video footage taken of the Field of Play (FOP) are the property of the FEI.
-FEI Guidelines for Publishing on Social Media, February 2024

Revising the Rulebook

As for my high horse, I have done unfathomable things to horses that I will spend my life making up for. Ignorance is not an excuse — we are learning more about the biology of horse and human emotions every day. The horse world is slow to accept innovation, but if we don’t do what we can now to make the horse’s experience better, we will not have an industry left. The questions won’t matter.

As I wrote this week, I received word that the American dressage team withdrew from the Olympic Games because a teammate’s mount showed traces of blood on a hind leg. Because of the Blood Rule, the horse was disqualified and the team withdrew because Olympic rules require three riders to complete the team.

While animal welfare laws went into effect in 1970 in the US, horse industry enforcement has only happened recently with the prevalence of video and social media. Most of the proposed rule changes by equestrian governing bodies have happened in the past eight years. And a true, hard-line approach to abuse in the rule books only happened in the past three years.

In February of this year, the FEI amended their social media rules to outlaw the videoing of what they call the “playing field” — the competition arenas and warm-up areas — by anyone who is not licensed by the organization. No one is allowed to post video on their websites or social media unless it comes directly from the FEI. The rule is presented as a method of reining in copyright infringement, but it serves one purpose — the FEI is now solely in charge of all documented video released to the public.

However, participants and spectators are currently allowed to post still photos.

Snapshots are easier to refute than real-time action.

If the recent video evidence showing Dujardin’s low moment was released as a single photograph, she would look like any other instructor in the world taking a step forward, her lunge whip in hand, following tradition, bringing young riders up the ranks.

In a photograph, a moment caught in time, she would look like any other riding instructor.

The burden of proof is on all of us as an industry. To have a future with horses, we have to do better and we have to re-write the rules to reflect our deeper understanding of the biology and psychology of pain. In many ways, it’s not just about revising our rules for the use of horses, it’s about formulating a new rulebook for what it means to be human.

I’m privileged to walk beside so many other horse professionals who, like me, are blundering their way blindfolded as we find a different path.

I want us to keep riding horses.

I want us to continue teaching riding lessons.

I want us to be allowed to work with horses in a rapidly changing world.

To do this, we have to own the knowledge that we’ve been doing it wrong the whole time while we feel our way forward into a better way.

I think this is possible.

Stable Roots

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