Longacre Stables & School of Horsemanship

Your Horse Business Is a Complex System. Are You Running it Like One? When something isn’t working in your horse business, the obvious solution can be tempting: raise your prices, find more clients, add stalls, cut expenses or improve your marketing. But horse businesses don’t operate in isolated pieces. A change in one area can create consequences somewhere else....

https://www.usef.org/media/newsletter/the-insider/the-thought-process-behind-double-bridle-rule?fbclid=IwdGRjcAURIrVwZG9mBWZkaWQWUOOChonBhbIlQ1ms-Iwu8HqOuOv-TGV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkCjY2Mjg1NjgzNzkAAR7F55up1Ah43m9iaHw1qE_Myb1sZykl07bll8r5n18eatew3EtJ71FqDADHxQ_aem_eXKRaA-sWb4KpbbaM2F3dA

The Thought Process Behind the Double Bridle Rule Change A rule change for the 2027 show season means that a double bridle is no longer permitted at Third Level dressage.

❤️ Dressage ❤️
The sport where ……
A halt must be direct transition but it can’t be abrupt. It should look like a bird landing on a branch, but cannot be so soft it’s progressive. It must be on the hind leg and has to be square and immobile, but not too short or too long. If the entry is too collected it doesn’t have enough quality, if the stride is longer the horse is too long and makes the halt neigh on impossible to execute like a bird. If the horse lifts it foot too quickly … it will be deemed not immobile and you’ll get a 4.
The trot must be expressive and powerful but must be relaxed. It must be short and compressed in the body with true collection and on the hind leg but it must also swing and be loose. There must be relaxation and rythm but also contained energy springing off the ground.
Collection is important but so is quality, expression, frame and ground cover.
The canter must jump off the ground and above all, be uphill…. But it cannot be too long in stride or frame because it must show collection at all times. Be careful to not allow the stride to become too collected and get small though.
You must have flexion and bend but you have to be straight at all times. You must use a lot of exercises to create bend and flexion to achieve the suppleness, collection and balance required but remember to always ride your horse straight.
The Germans always like to say the horse should sweep the cobwebs out of the corners with their tails when they turn a corner (meaning the horse should turn without bringing the quarters in) but you also have to create bend in the corners.

You might get told for years to extend the trot from marker to marker, then you’ll go to Europe and be told to quietly build the extended trot as you go.
You must have enough bend in the half pass but if you have too much you’ll lose the shoulder. Don’t forget to be upright.

If you’re in one country you have to start your half pass turning into the diagonal line first then catching the quarters, if you’re in another country you’ll spend hours being told this is not correct and you have to leave from shoulder in. Both are correct depending on where you are.

You can ride a Volte inside leg to outside hand and turn your body or you can create the bend and use your outside aids. Both are acceptable.

If you’re in Holland you ride with two legs and two hands with the horse in between. Hand to stop, leg to go. In Germany you ride from the leg into the contact, inside leg to outside hand, and use your seat more. Both are correct.

In piaffe you want the horse to sit, but not too much! You want active hind legs but not so much they balance on the front legs and not moving faster or more active than the front legs. You want them thinking forward but not actually moving too forward but if they think even an inch backwards you forget all of that and ride them forwards.

The passage must be elevated and rhythmical, not too quick but it has to active. Active but relaxed, but big.

Pirouettes must be collected and balanced, between 6-8 strides, but not too quick and not too laboured. They must be uphill but not climbing. Not too high in frame but not too low either. Not too big and not too small.

Finally … If a horse wants to be high you must ride him down and if he wants to be down you must ride him high.

See it’s simple really. 🤷‍♀️😆

JK

Every single Suffolk Punch alive today, anywhere in the world, descends in the male line from one stallion born in 1768 in a small English village — not because breeders chose to narrow the bloodline that tightly, but because by the time he came along, every other line had already quietly died out.

The Suffolk Punch comes from Suffolk and Norfolk, in the East Anglian region of England, where heavy draft horses were already being bred and worked as early as the 1500s, described in William Camden's Britannia in 1586 in terms that historians still can't fully match to any horse type recognizable today. What developed on the thick, heavy clay soil of that region was a horse built purely for one job: pulling a plow through difficult ground, all day, without stopping. Unlike other draft breeds developed for war, carriage work, or later crossed for show and sport, the Suffolk Punch was bred almost exclusively for farm labor, and that singular purpose shaped everything about it, from its short, powerful legs to its notably calm, willing temperament.

Then, in the 1760s, the breed passed through a genetic bottleneck. By that point, the male lines that had existed until then had died out, leaving the breed's future resting entirely on one stallion, Crisp's Horse of Ufford, foaled in 1768 near Woodbridge in Suffolk, owned by a man named Thomas Crisp. At the time, the breed was actually known as the Suffolk Sorrel, and every Suffolk Punch alive today, without exception, traces its bloodline back through him.

The breed's most recognizable trait, its solid chestnut coat, comes in seven officially recognized shades, from bright and golden to dark and liver, but it is always chestnut, never any other color, a level of uniformity almost unheard of among draft breeds. The Suffolk Horse Society was founded in 1877, and the first official studbook followed in 1880, formally documenting a bloodline that had already been bred true for over a century.

Here's the detail that surprises people: despite once being the workhorse backbone of East Anglian farming for centuries, the Suffolk Punch is now so rare that conservation groups have described it as rarer, in population terms, than the giant panda, with fewer than 80 breeding mares remaining in the UK and global numbers estimated under 600.

Mechanization did to the Suffolk Punch what it did to nearly every draft breed in the 20th century, gutting demand almost overnight, but dedicated breeders and organizations like the Suffolk Punch Trust have kept the bloodline alive, working to slowly rebuild numbers despite the genetic narrowness the breed has carried since that single stallion in 1768. Today, Suffolk Punches still plow demonstration fields, work in forestry, and pull carriages at heritage events, a living link to a breed that came within one horse of disappearing before it had even fully begun.