Originally published on Substack
"The horse is a born runner, and his natural will is to move without being asked to do so."
So wrote Karl Mikolka in an influential article on dressage training.
And in a sense, he is right. But he's also wrong.
Horses move.
They evolved to travel considerable distances every day. They move towards water, towards food, towards companions, towards shelter, towards safety. They explore. They investigate. Young horses play.
But there is another truth about horses that is often overlooked.
Horses are not simply born runners.
They are born survivors.
And survival, for a prey animal, depends heavily on conserving energy.
Every unnecessary calorie burned is a calorie unavailable later. Nature does not reward wastefulness. Adult feral horses do not spend their days galloping for pleasure. They graze, rest, socialise, and move efficiently between resources. Their lives are organised around balancing energy expenditure against survival.
The great exception is play.
Young horses play exuberantly. They race, buck, rear, and chase one another. Adult domestic horses sometimes do too.
But adult feral horses rarely engage in prolonged play. Once maturity arrives, efficiency tends to replace exuberance. Movement becomes purposeful.
And that is the important point.
Horses move when there is a reason to move.
They move towards something. Or away from something. Movement is not the goal.
The destination is the goal.
A horse crossing a paddock is not expressing a love of locomotion. It is travelling from where it is to where it wants to be. The movement has meaning because something meaningful exists at the end of it.
This is where the concept of "forward" begins to unravel.
Because a horse knows when it enters a dressage arena that it is not going anywhere.
It is simply going around and around.
The same corners.
The same circles.
The same tracks.
Again and again and again.
To us, the movement has purpose. The circle develops balance. The transition develops responsiveness. The shoulder-in develops straightness. The half-pass develops collection.
But those meanings belong to us.
Not to the horse.
The horse does not understand biomechanics, gymnastic development, or the training scale. It does not know that today's exercise is supposedly preparing it for something months or years in the future. From the horse's perspective, it has entered an enclosed space and is being asked to move without arriving anywhere.
Eventually it learns there is nowhere to get to.
And once the destination disappears, so does the horse's natural reason to keep moving.
What remains is not "forward" in the evolutionary sense. It is locomotion generated and maintained by the rider.
The horse is naturally forward when it is going somewhere.
A dressage arena offers nowhere to go.