Ok.. So I had my first Reining Clinic with Cindy Lewis on Monday.
The BO is on a 10 yr mare- Velvet, and I am on 5 yr gelding - Ryder, pictured above. She starts talking and, between scattered curse words, tells me the first thing I need to do (before she sees me ride, after I tell her I used to teach equitation) was to throw all of my position out the window, that I wouldn't need it and would be doing whatever it took to get the desired response from the horse. She also said that we need to have control over the 5 body parts of the horse - head, neck, shoulders, barrel, hip. So for the head, she said to bump with my legs and that was my horse's cue to drop his head. So we worked on that a little. Then the neck, bending each way. Then the shoulders. take reins across neck, spur with outside leg, step, was the idea. So we start working on this and the horse isn't taking a step. She says "Pull harder, spur harder, kick! kick! kick!" so I'm pulling, kicking, spurring and horse is not moving shoulder. Moving all over but not shoulder, so she is yelling at me to pull harder, to kick harder, so I keep pulling and kicking, and the horse starts to come up to rear, I instinctively start to push him forward as she screams "kick him! forward!!" He goes forward and she says to kick his booty and punish him. Then she says "That's the kind of stuff that's going to get someone killed! That's it, I'm getting on him." She borrows a pair of boots with spurs from another person there, since she had hiking shoes on, and climbs up on the horse, (I noticed she mounted by pulling the horn and cantle, just an observation.) and she gets on and starts doing the same thing, asking for his shoulder to move by pulling, spurring, ramping up to full-force kicking the horse with one spur in the side, and after trying multiple outs including standing still and flinching with each kick, he rears, BAD. so she drives him forward and continues kicking him full force with both spurs. This goes on for a while and then she gets off and the owner of the horse gets on. Same thing continues to happen and the horse rears even worse, and the owner almost came off. Then they get out a piece of wood someone found in the barn, a 1" by 2" (and about a foot long) board broken off of something (sharp at one end) and they proceed to hit the horse on the shoulder and rump with the board. Someone brought out a 2'x4' but it was too long for the owner to hold. So, everyone there is hooping and hollering and cheering the girls on. The horse did not reach the desired goal by the end of the lesson. I have tried my best to present an objective observation, I will add my own opinion to an extent -
I don't feel the horse knew what was being asked of him. I don't feel that the request was fair. But I also don't have very much experience with training. To the reining trainers out there, does this sound right? Because if this is what reining is all about, I'm not so sure it's the discipline for me.