Thursday, 17 March 2011

Say No To Rollkur and LDR


Alot of debate about this subject is going on both on internet forums and on seminars etc. At the Hingstekåring herning 2011 rollkur was displayed by one of the riders in the Edward Gal clinic- yet none did anything about it, despite the fact that Roll Kur is an illegal practice method according to FEI. How is that okay?
Anky and Sjef which are the founders of this training method never called it Roll Kur, they have always called it LDR (low, deep and round), and this is where in my book the issues begin with Low Deep and round- Why is Rollkur then forbidden and LDR not, when the founder of Rollkur always has called it LDR? Maybe they should not ban "the name", which I think it seems to be like- but actually ban the method, regardsless of what is is called. Which means that if you practice training methods where you pull the horse in its mouth and apply hard helpers, officials at the competitions should intervene- and this should be regardless of it being a dressage, jumping or whatever competition it is seen at.

I could accept LDR if it was only performed with the horse in the following position (which alot of people claim it is):
and if it was only for short periods of time that the horse was trained in that form, then it would be acceptable- even though I would never personally train my horse like that.
The problem is that this image is very far from reality by alot of the top performers, the reality, unfortunately, often look like this:

Which in my world is absolute cruelty towards horses and this is why I strongly oppose toward these kind of training methods. The following methods has nothing to do with dressage, dressage is about making a horse use itself in the most correct way to avoid injuries (building up the right muscles, so the horse can bear the rider as easy as possible), to make it soft and to make it respond to the riders helpers with as small a signal as possible, og making it able to perform the different dressage exercises as correctly as possible- Pulling a horses head in, while agressively applying whip and legs with spurs does none of those things.

The only way I would use LDR would be the LDR and out variants (also called remonte) which looks like this and is used on young horses, horses with issues and horses which are being re-dressaged:



(borrowed from google)
 Where the horse seeks the briddle, stretches its neck and gets its back up while working in a manageable tempo. 

The idea with remonte training:


 Rollkur aka LDR does the oposite-working the nose from in the wrong position in training till out in the correct position for shows- doesnt make much sense.

So really- Just say no to Rollkur and the LDR variants of it.





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