This message is from: Lori Albrough <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The video evaluation idea has a certain allure for helping to deal with the realities of our geography. However, I think it is hard to get a true picture of a horse from a video. I will use videos to help me decide whether I want to go see a horse, but rarely to make a final decision on it, unless a trusted advisor of mine has also seen the horse in person.
Steven Wolgemuth, US long-listed dressage rider, who now helps people find dressage horses domestically and overseas, had this to say about evaluating a horse from a video in a recent article in Dressge Today magazine:
"Be careful not to judge a horse too harshly when trying to evaluate his overall quality. Videos can be the enemy of great horses and a friend to poor-quality horses. They can make great horses look just a bit better than average and bad horses look just a bit worse than average."
Before I read this article, I had already noticed this "averagizing" effect of the technology, both in making a great one appear more average and a not-so-good one appear OK, so it was interesting to have this observation confirmed.
The other thing that video can do is make a "moment" appear to sum up a horse. The video viewer is missing a lot of context, but can only judge what he is seeing, whether or not it is an accurate reflection of the true animal. As Wolgemuth says,
"A videotape can make a good or bad moment more real than it truly is. ... A horse’s unfortunate mistake, wrong step or brilliant moment is not a trusted normality, even if a video captured it."
Wolgemuth uses this anecdote to illustrate how much presentation can influence perception of the horse,
"I recently reviewed a video of a beautiful, refined, light bay gelding with long legs and light, lovely, sweeping gaits. He was being ridden in white polo wraps on a sunny day in perfect footing in a beautiful outdoor arena. Moments later, the tape switched to a dark brown, chubby, short-legged, average-moving horse. To my surprise, it turned out to be the same horse. The second part of the tape was filmed under poor lighting in deeper, wet footing and the horse had no leg wraps. The difference was incredible. I was again reminded how the camera can radically distort reality."
My experience is that "being there" allows the person who is evaluating the horse to form a much more balanced and realistic picture of the true animal. I already believe that there is no way that "15 minutes on the triangle" can sum up the value of a horse, but can only give us one more data-point about him. I would certainly not give even that much credence to an evaluation that was purely virtual. The free-lunging vs in-hand gait analysis definitely presents another important viewpoint, though live-in-person would be my preference. (The free-lunging was one of my favorite /most-useful-to-me parts of the Norwegian stallion evaluation) Is a virtual evaluation better than nothing? Probably as an educational tool, yes, but let's not make it into something more than it can ever be.
Lori Albrough Moorefield Ontario
