I had competed to Prix St Georges. I had trained with masters. I rode with a double bridle because that was what one did. I had done everything correctly — or what I had been taught to believe was correct.
And then one day I took the bit out.
What happened next changed everything I thought I knew about dressage, about horses, and about the sport I had devoted decades of my life to.
Leo — my big roan gelding — didn't change. His movement didn't collapse. His willingness didn't evaporate. His collection didn't fall apart without the double bridle's curb leverage to maintain it.
It got better.
The tightness around his jaw released. The brace in his poll softened. Something that had been managed became, suddenly, offered. He moved through himself in a way I had been trying to produce for years through contact and collection and all the tools the system had given me — and none of it had produced what removing those tools produced in an afternoon.
This book is the answer to that question. It took me through history, through physics, through welfare science, and through a forensic examination of how a sport that began with Xenophon's insight that force produces nothing beautiful became a sport in which horses are presented at the Olympics with nosebands so tight they cannot move their jaws, in head positions that the physics of levers demonstrates cannot produce what the judges are awarding them for.
I am not a theorist. I am a rider who competed at Prix St Georges level on the same horses I now ride in a halter and a neck rope, in a paddock outside Canberra, in full view of anyone who wants to watch. I am a WOW saddle fitter who understands weight distribution biomechanically. I am a welfare advocate who has been told by Equestrian Australia that they cannot permit me to compete hors concours in a bitless bridle because it is not currently in the rules.
The Fillis argument, the welfare science, the FEI's own internal contradictions, the Dutch national rules, the Hawkeye proposal — all of it starts here, in a paddock, with a horse who chose to stay when he didn't have to.
Look at the eye. You'll know which one I mean.
Everything that follows is the answer to what that eye is asking.