Caprilli: riding horses according to their nature, not against it

Captain Federico Caprilli was born in 1868 in Livorno on the west coast of Italy, at a time when there was a growing awareness of how different species display their emotional state through physical expressions – for example, raising eyebrows when surprised. Notably, this topic was explored in Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872.

Years later, after becoming a cavalry instructor in the Italian military, Caprilli followed Darwin’s observational approach by doing a ‘thorough study of the psychology and mechanics of locomotion of the horse’ – in part by looking at photographs of them jumping. He saw that the animals naturally landed on their forelegs after rounding their body in a ‘bascule’ arc shape in the air. However, the traditional riding and jumping position for riders had been to sit further back, using longer stirrups and pulling up at an obstacle, pushing the animals to land more towards their hind legs.

In response, the Italian created the forward seat technique, a position and style of riding in which the rider’s weight is centred forward in the saddle, over the horse’s shoulder blades. “Basically, he shortened riders’ stirrups, got them off the horse’s back, and let the horses jump instead of the riders lifting them over the jumps,” explains John Strassburger in Horse Journal. This approach, Strassburger says, “allowed the horse to become a partner, responsible for his own balance.”

Along the same lines, Caprilli also favoured a minimalist approach in using (as Morris describes them) “all the artificial aids that counter the horse and are against the body of the horse.” In a way, then, he came down on the side of following a horse’s natural instincts rather than ‘breaking’ it and creating a “‘learned helplessness’, in which the horse must react with exaggerated movement, because not reacting means even more stress.”

In any case, while the history of horse training is a complex subject, Strassburger provides a good overview: “Determining who is the boss has been at the heart of our relationship with horses ever since humans began driving and riding them centuries ago,” he observes. “Prior to the Renaissance, European horse training exclusively involved devices like huge curb bits and sharp, roweled spurs designed to manhandle unruly or resistant horses into submission. But during the enlightenment of the Renaissance, the French and Italian cavalry schools, harking back [to] Xenophon, showed that horses weren’t necessarily evil or bad, just misunderstood and mishandled.”

“Ask yourself,” he adds, “what is our goal in training horses? Are we trying to create robots that do nothing unless directed by us, that respond dutifully, but with no enthusiasm, to our every command? Or are we trying to develop partners, animals who respond correctly to our aids, but who are able to think and to act and react with enthusiasm, partners who can cover up or even fix our miscues?”

In this tradition of working with horses rather than making them submissive, George Morris says, “For myself, I look at what the horse wants…. We are dealing with a living entity who has feelings. And we are responsible for that living entity.”