Journals from Devon - Mack's Musings
“Our Horses’ Canine Companions”
Special to Dressage Daily #1
By Father Mack (a.k.a.: Father Larry David McCormick)

And then it struck me. Those very gross caricatures I have just drawn of dressage and jumping: “flat work” versus “airborne,” these are as key to the breeds as they are to the respective sports. The long, low Corgi with its four (admittedly lithe) feet firmly planted upon terra firma while the Terrier performs its version of airs above the ground. “There!” I said to myself, “There is the key!”

It is, to repeat myself, a gross caricature of the two competitions. Colleagues at the university – when I tell them that Ruth cultivates her skills in the art of dressage – frequently ask me to explain the sport to them. Frequently these coworkers have seen some form of show jumping on the telly (in my less charitable moments I attribute the small screen’s penchant for jumping to the desire of the US populace to “see a horse crash,” mea maxima culpa!) and they wish to know how dressage compares to or differs from such athletics.

In my own labored (and, no doubt, overly academic) manner I have spent countless hours explaining that the skill first described by General Xenophon, the art of dressage, provides the foundation upon which all horse sport is built. Somewhere in the first paragraph of my explanations (usually between the sentence about being able to change the horse’s lead so as to fit in an extra half stride and the following sentence concerning tempi), the now dispirited questioner’s eyes glaze over due to ennui.

Now, NOW I see the error of my ways. Had I but pointed to the wee doggies who traipse about after horses and riders – had I related the natural strengths of these wee fellows and gals to the associated horse sport – THEN (God willing) I would not have lost my audience to the grasp of tedium.

Do you see what I mean? It is the way in which our wee broth of a lass, the Corgi, seemingly hugs the Earth with each paw. The manner of her sinking those elegant little claws into the soil so that she can turn on a dime and give seven cents as change. The precise placing of her paws in a canine imitation of the trot. Each of these movements are offered as counterpart to the tempi, the piaffe, all the gaits we prize in our dressage partners. Are they not?

And, then, there are those adorable, rambunctious rascals who more frequently accompany the flying horses. They, like their horse friends, leap and caper and soar. Oh, yes, they are as well schooled as are our Corgis in the fundamentals of flat work, but they have within them a more volatile spirit that, at least occasionally, must find expression in the aether.

Permit me to close my deliberation with a caveat (intended as much to keep you, dear reader, from pummeling me with your fists as it is to warn of innate shortcomings in my argument): There are Parson Russell Terriers of a more reserved mindset just as there are rakish Corgis with devil-may-care attitudes. Painting all dressage horses or all hunter-jumper riders with the same brush runs the risk of grotesque oversimplification.

I invite all of us – whether you will have the joy of being in the stands of the Dixon Oval or will be following the results here at Dressage Daily – to apply our powers of observation when next we meet an affiliate of these parties, the Corgis and the Terriers, and to ask whether we see them in Shadbelly and top hat or vested in jodhpurs and helmet? The proof or failure of my thesis will found in such examinations.