When I interviewed Yvonne Barteau, international dressage competitor, trainer, and author of Ride the Right Horse: Understanding the Core Equine Personalities and How to Work with Them, I was going through a very difficult time with my dressage horse, Baleno.
To be truthful, our five-year relationship has been less than harmonious. He's an auction horse, likely sold because he bombed out in the jumper ring despite incredible physical talent. He'd been in a large sale barn, treated as one of many with different grooms and little personal attention.
I bought Bee (as I call him) because when I'd ridden him he seemed quiet, steady, and even a bit unresponsive. I liked that. To me, it meant reliability in the show ring. While the other horses were flying around in the auction arena, frightened of flapping tablecloths, and the auctioneer's table with its flyers and amplifier and accoutrements, Baleno trotted around confidently.
When Bee came home with me, he spent the first few hours establishing himself as master of my already-established herd of two. Over the next months, he also established himself as master of me, to be honest. He's big, he's prone to kicking out when angered, he liked to scrape my leg against the fence, and he'd stop and hop up and down whenever the question I was asking him got a little challenging.
Personality Insights
- Learning about different horse personality types can help us learn to work most effectively with our horses.
- The horse's personality should guide everything we do.
- Stress brings out the true personality in all of us, both human and horse.
- Certain human personality traits match well with some horse traits, and make it easier to get along and move forward in partnership.
Sometime during that first year, Bee suddenly decided he wasn't-no way, no how-going to load in the trailer. This was not a fear-related reaction. He'd loaded many times and ridden calmly. There had been no mishaps. It was mysterious to me, but somehow he'd learned to take advantage of a weakness. I'd never owned a horse with loading troubles and had no idea how to fix the problem.
One of the great advantages of writing about horses is the opportunity to talk with insightful professionals. While my discussion with Yvonne Barteau was a professional assignment, the benefits of the interview-as well as reading her book beforehand-gave me new insight into my own relationship with horses, and Bee particularly.
How It All Started
Yvonne wrote her book, Ride the Right Horse: Understanding the Core Equine Personalities and How to Work with Them, in only a few months. The book evolved from a system she and her husband, Kim, developed while working first at Arabian Nights Dinner Theatre in Orlando, Florida, and later at the training facility where, at any given time, they have 40 to 60 horses in training.
At the dinner theatre, equine performers must learn to bear enormous distractions-thousands of busy, noisy audience members, flowing costumes, spotlights, music, fire, running people, etc. The horses not only have to learn to keep their wits, but they also have to perform in the shows. Tricks, liberty work, and haute école dressage movements are expected of them. That environment tests any horse's personality, and under such stress, their real natures tend to show through, Yvonne says.
