Showing Your Horse In A Hunter Event
Wednesday, May 9th, 2012One highly regarded event at pony shows is the Hunter Under Saddle. While these events are probably most commonly seen in Northeast America, you can see them at other parts of the country and the world too. Regardless of your horse’s breed and your level of participation, judges are alert to certain indicators. Here are some insights for you.
The perfect hunter shows perfect manners, pliability, quality of motion and correctness in function. Hunters must be eminently appropriate for the purpose, which means they ride the fields and cover enormous territory with minimum effort. A perfect hunter’s stride is long and low. He reaches ahead with ease and grace. The rider should be able to reduce or lengthen the horse’s stride at will. The horse must move readily and with smooth-flow thru all of the gaits. Two of the biggest scoring elements as far as judges are concerned are movement quality and gait consistency.
Hunters should exhibit obedience. They should be bright and alert of countenance, and react to the lightest of hand or leg contact. They must be able to transition between different gaits effortlessly. When they need to extend trots or gallop, it ought to be done smoothly, with the flow of motion that characterizes the other gaits. The horses poll should be level or just above its withers. Judges penalize for polls held lower than the withers. The head should be held in a position of vertical or just a bit forward of vertical.
There are penalties if the hunter is on a wrong lead leg while cantering or the rider is on at a wrong diagonal while trotting. The hunter will be penalised if he is taking short, quick steps or exhibits too much knee action. He faces penalization also if he is too quick or too slow, though most judges are gracious of every horse’s need to run at the pace that it finds most comfy. Judges don’t require disproportionate canters, nor do they desire exhibitors getting all twitchy about passing. When you’re passing a fifteen-hand pony on a seventeen-hand pony, you need to do so at a canter. Horses are also penalised if they fail to tame the gait on cue or if the break the gait regularly.
Hunters also pay a penalty for head carriages that are too low or too high, and for intolerably flexing or nosing out. The rider needs to keep in contact with his horse’s mouth, since he has to ride the horse in-hand. Tossing of the head and constantly showing too far off the rail are also penalised.
Horses are Heather Toms passion and she enjoys sharing her extensive knowledge through her 100s of articles with other horse lovers, like all things about horse riding clothes
