05/05/2024
One evening in 1976, when the USET 3-day team was training out of Mrs Hannum’s barn in Unionville, Pennsylvania, we all went to watch a horse show, can’t remember which one, possibly Devon?
Anyway, Mike Plumb and I were sitting watching Rodney Jenkins warming up for a jumper round, and he had just two fences. One was a single rail, no groundline, I’m guessing maybe 4’3 to 4’6, and the other was a totally square oxer, again, no groundline, just two parallel rails, at about 4’3, spread wide, probably 6 feet across, at least.
Rodney would canter to the vertical, sort of loop the reins, letting the horse rock back and jump up, then he’d circle back to the oxer, same thing, not “saving” the horse from a bad distance, just letting the horse jump up around the fence.
Bernie Traurig has a saying---“Don’t be a bad copy of a genius.” Lots of riders started chucking the reins at their horses, trying to copy Rodney’s technique, but lacking Rodney’s exquisite feel, timing, sense of canter, razor blade eye.
If a horse is allowed to “eat” the jump, over time, many horses will begin to defend themselves from the sting of the knock, and will try harder, but there’s a fine line between challenging a horse and demoralizing a horse by dumping it into too many bad distances from an inactive canter, and while the ultra-rare Rodney Jenkins of the horse world can get away with it, most of us can’t.
This goes along with the previous post about how, by the end of the hunting season, there were fewer broken top rails. Horses don’t like to hit jumps, but how we, as riders, can help or hinder them is the sixty four dollar question---.
