Beginner,
Intermediate, Advanced: Check
One
From
the President
Jan Dawson
[reproduced
from Winter 2002 Caution:Horses]
Many
forms for lesson and trails rides ask this question of new customers:
are you a beginner, intermediate or advanced rider?
Depending
on the discipline, area, type of program, general experience, or
necessity of learning, the same person might be characterized as any of
these at any time. The
situation is not improved by asking how many lessons someone has had
because the person that grew up on a ranch in Montana or South Texas
probably never had any lessons. He
will say, I never had a lesson but I have been riding all my life."
Unfortunately,
the sentence, "I've been riding all my life" is the same
statement that the weekend rider will make and this rider will not
understand that his hour or two once a week for many years does not
equal 10 to 12 hours a day doing cow work on a horse to make a living
for the family.
A
"D3" level Pony Clubber is in the lowest level but by general
standards no one would call someone who has passed her "D3"
exam a beginner. Some
riding programs will move students into what they call the
"advanced class" as soon as they have experienced their first
canter or gone over their first crossed poles even though their balance
on the horse may be extremely precarious.
It is the terminology of that barn.
When that student goes to camp or on a trail ride he or she will
say "I am in the advanced class at my riding school."
To most people that statement would not signify a student who
could barely trot and only do a little canter.
Experienced
instructors and trainers are accustomed to this problem and simply go
with the flow. Most tend to
run all students through the basics anyway to make sure there are no
glaring holes that need to be fixed.
It gives them a chance to evaluate, rebalance and formulate a
plan for the student.
Trail
ride wranglers, inexperienced instructors teaching without supervision
(not a good idea ever), and horse sellers may not be so aware that the
student knows only what his or her lesson program has taught him, or
less if he is guessing. He
has learned a scale for beginner, intermediate, and advanced and does
not realize that it is not universal.
The youngster who has been taking riding lessons and been
learning to jump in a nice ring may be unaware when she goes to try out
her first horse to take home that riding in the pastures and meadows is
quite different. It may be
different to the horse too, often with disastrous results.
Questions
that an experienced instructor or trainer will ask automatically may not
occur to the inexperienced. Where
have you been taking your lessons, in a ring only or do they include
cross-country? If you are
learning Western Pleasure, have you ridden only this type of horse or
have you ridden out of the arena? Where
do you plan to ride this horse? Is
this comparable to where you have taken your lessons?
You have ridden all you life but what training have you
had? What type of
accidents have you had and what do you believe to have been the causes?
If
the questions are for a public trail ride where the guest is likely to
go one time and not be around for a whole week as with a guest ranch,
the questions become critical and the ride needs to be managed as if all
riders are BEGINNERS unless different information can be documented.
Wranglers would want to know the following:
Have you ridden before? How
many times? Have you had
lessons? How many?
Have you owned your own horse?
How long did you have your own horse?
Because
of the terminology and self-evaluation problems, it is impossible to
safely take a ride out without a pre-ride skills test.
Just because a wrangler demonstrates skills to a bunch of people
does not mean that they can do them.
Having the skills test is insurance for the wrangler and ranch
that not only were the customers shown the skills but they had to
demonstrate an ability to perform them.
The
skills test sort of takes the place of the instructors going through the
basics with everyone just to make sure that there is nothing missing.
The skills test will also let the wrangler see if any horse/rider
combination does not work or if some one is going to be so nervous as to
be a danger to himself or a hazard to others.
Beginner,
intermediate, and advanced should not mean much to the people with the
responsibility for safety. They
are only labels and will never give anyone reliable information about
anything other than a rider's perception of his or her own skills or a
parent's perception of the skills of their child - and that is another
can of worms altogether.
Reprinted with permission of the
copyright holder and the American Association for Horsemanship
Safety. P.O. Box 39, Fentress, TX 78622.
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