The Role of the Riding Instruction Professional

What is the job of the horse professional when working with riding clients? 

Our job is simple: care for, protect, advocate for and ensure the comfort and wellbeing of the horses in our care in spite of and because of the work we are asking horses to do on humans’ behalf. 

What this means is that our main job is to champion the horse.

This means ensuring that they are well cared for in their daily life, fed appropriate diets, kept fit enough to accomplish their jobs, kept in well fitting tack, continually trained for their discipline, provided the rest they require and socialization with other horses. 

It requires us to teach riders proper riding technique, demand softness in the reins and cues, continually correct for balanced and centered riding to reduce burden on the mount, ask for good and decisive timing and insist that riders set proper and attainable goals for every ride on each horse.

It empowers us to have people take responsibility for the horses they ride. This may simply be taking charge of picking up their mount’s poop in the arena after lesson or making sure a horse is never put back in a stall without water, making sure the horse is comfortable with proper blankets or fly protection or even providing the support for barn staff to help their mount get through long or short term veterinary issues. 

It also means that we enforce a standard of behavior in the humans interacting with horses and instill a level of respect for the work being received from the horse. It means we define what is kind, what is overly indulgent and what is irreverent. We delineate what boundaries are acceptable – for both horse and humans. It calls for us to insist on fair and respectful treatment of horses, even if the horse may have a moment in which they require discipline, and also a sensitivity to the reason a horse may have made the misstep in the first place. 

It means we enforce a level of accountability from the people who interact with a horse. This accountability includes recognizing how their actions and behaviors reflect on a horse and their actions and behavior – and owning them. 

Our job is not to:

• Place the enjoyment and pleasure of the rider over the circumstances of the horse.
  
• Empower and embolden riders regardless of their own behavior and accountability.

• Enable egos or lack of humility by allowing people to inflate or hyperbolize their own skills and experience because without humility you can have no awareness.
  
• Expect unreasonable patience from a horse to tolerate a rider’s inadequacies. 

• Allow the horse to be blamed or reprimanded for their reactions, responses and frustrations due to a rider’s failures or inadequacies. Most horse “bad behaviors” are in response to human bad behaviors which may also include inaccurate or poorly timed responses and cues… and lack thereof. 

• Allow people to use horses as simply a tool for their recreation.  

While our lesson and riding horses are used for enjoyment and recreation purposes in people’s lives, the enjoyment should come from the responsibility and shared experience with the horse, not the adventure of riding. 

Every interaction a student or client has with a horse is an opportunity to apply their horsemanship or practice their ability to learn and change for the better. These interactions are actually test of THEIR worthiness to continue to interact with that horse, the riding program, and even be a member of the barn community at large.