The “Guidelines for Riding and Driving” are the rules of the FN for horse training. In it, the association describes the touching training method. The horse’s legs are touched with a pole when it jumps over the obstacle. This is intended to encourage the animal to pull its legs up more so that it does not bump into the obstacle.
“The touching bar may have a maximum weight of 2,000 g and a length of 3 m. The nature of the bar must be round with a smooth surface made of non-splintering material. However, it must not be made of metal.”
Writes the rules. And the requirements for the “touching trainers” are also laid down in the set of rules:
“If the touching bar is held, this may only be carried out by very experienced, routine horse professionals who have sufficient feeling, sensitivity and experience.”
Touching replaced bars
The FN has replaced the forbidden “parallel bars” with the “touching” training method. With parallel bars, a person stands behind the obstacle, not visible to the horse, and “whacks the horse’s legs from below with a metal or wooden pole when jumping over it. With the method of parallel bars, the horse is forced to perform better by deliberately inflicting pain,” according to an explanation and assessment by the German Animal Welfare Association.
Public outrage over training methods
In 1990, pictures of the former world-class rider Paul Schockemöhle on parallel bars caused a scandal. And for absolute incomprehension and outrage in public about such training methods.
After that, the FN replaced bars with touching. However, the differences are difficult to convey and verify. Now it’s all going to be banned. Most recently, images from the RTL television channel brought the topic back onto the agenda. Ludger Beerbaum, Olympic champion in show jumping on parallel bars, should be seen in these pictures. Beerbaum denies that the scenes are about bars.
FN prohibits touching
After a year of discussion about touching, Jens Adolphsen, the equestrian sports official and member of the responsible FN Commission for Training, assesses the FN’s decision to also ban touching as follows: “All in all, the decision for me was completely clear that it would be over a set of rules of an association that wants to do animal-friendly sport with animals.”
He thinks it took a year for this decision to be normal for an association that also has to deal with many other issues, says Adolphsen. Before Beerbaum was accused, there was no specific reason to deal with the issue. In retrospect, the decision to touch 30 years ago was not a good one, but those were different people and different times. Today, for Adolphsen, the public is also a factor to which he must be able to explain the equestrian sport and the training methods used with conviction.
That’s why the commission in the association must continue to deal with education and training methods: “The cow isn’t from the ice,” says Adolphsen. With the rules found, animal-hostile methods in “criminals” are not excluded, but the rules also apply behind closed doors.