“My Horse Has a Voice; I’m Just Trying to Figure Out What to Do With It”: Communication Between Canadian Dressage Coaches, Riders, and Horses
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Evidence suggests that competitive dressage may compromise horses’ physical and emotional welfare. The coach–rider–horse relationship is paramount to the wellbeing of dressage horses. Therefore, this study sought to explore the relationship between equestrian coaches, riders, and horses during dressage lessons. Specifically, the objectives of this study were to explore (1) the way dressage coaches and riders interpret, respond to, and elicit specific horse behaviors, and (2) the way these interactions influence horse behavior and the learning process between coaches and riders. Using an ethnographic case study design, the first author spent 2–6 weeks with each of the four participating Equestrian Canada certified dressage coaches, conducting interviews with each coach (n = 4) and rider (n = 19), recording field notes and video recording 30 dressage lessons with a Pivo device and a GoPro camera strapped to the rider’s chest. Multimodal interaction analysis was employed to transcribe and analyze rider and horse behavior and coach–rider dialogue during dressage lessons. Reflexive thematic analysis was applied to field notes, interviews, and video transcripts to develop codes and themes to represent the data. Three themes were developed. The first theme portrayed that equestrian coaches believed they listened to horse behavior to guide their application of horse training methods. The second theme highlighted that horses’ behavior may instill emotions (e.g., fear) in riders, which in turn affects their ability to implement instruction from the coach. The last theme underscored the lack of clear, actionable language used during dressage lessons that may hinder communication between coach and rider, contributing to negative affective states for the horse. Overall, the findings suggest a need to evaluate training approaches, emphasizing that equestrians’ emotions may be a barrier to understanding coach instructions and implementing training methods that promote horse welfare.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it