I'm sure you've heard WP people claim that the slow, pitter-patter gaits are completely natural and you can allegedly see them doing it out in the pasture on their own. Well, I've never seen a horse with no rider move like that (except in stock breed shows, which I won't even go into). This video is proof. You see the stallion running around his pasture like a normal horse at a normal speed (with his head up!), and then they show him under saddle and moving like a 35 year old cart horse with his nose down to his knees.
The WP gaits are not natural. They've taken natural gaits and ruined them. Show horses are supposed to embody the vision of a proud, strong, and alert horse, but WP horses don't convey any of those. The slow gaits are nothing but a hideous, tasteless trend. The whole point of WP is to show a horse that is a pleasure to ride, but these horses don't look very nice to ride at all.
In the last quarter of the video, it shows the lady riding him bareback and he's moving with a lot more energy. So he can move normally. Plus it looked a lot better to ride. Notice also that there were of couple of HUS pics, and the horse had the same frame as a western horse and the rider had the reins draping. That should never be acceptable in an English discipline. It's bad enough that western horses are so messed up. English horses (and horses in general) are suppsed to have elasticity and freedom of movement, and you see none of that in the HUS ring. And, like WP, it didn't start out like that. It's all a trend. As obsessed as equestrians are with tradition, you'd think we'd want to go back to the way things were, when the horses were actually not stick-legged robots.
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