Jean Luc Cornille
Have a look at this clip.
The trainer is a well-known dressage trainer in Florida, USA. About the only thing to recommend Jean Luc Cornille is that he can sit pretty well on vertical horses. He claims the horse was developing a hoof abscess and the pain made it rear. Yet, I see no sign of lameness or unevenness in the horse’s movement. I have never come across a horse showing such extreme behaviour because of an abscess without some kind of lameness. And if you search through other videos of the same horse and same trainer, you’ll find other examples of rearing behaviour. Does the horse have chronic hoof abscess problems?
I think the cause of the rearing behaviour is more likely to be seen in this next video.
Se you can see how unfocused the horse is. He looks outside the circle constantly when being lunged. Even when he approaches the jump quietly, he is not checking in the either the jump or Jean Luc. The horse is like this because he hates his training
Notice the behaviour after the jump and how Jean Luc is oblivious to the fact the horse is doing it’s own thing – which is to express his feelings about Jean Luc and being made to jump the poles. He is not a happy horse. Jean Luc is completely unaware of the horse’s feelings about the exercise. He seems to make the stupid assumption that the important part is how the horse approaches the jump and misses entirely the part about what goes on after the jump.
To me this screams loud and clear than Jean Luc is a trick trainer, not a dressage master, as he would like us to believe. He is misses the part where what goes on inside a horse is more important than the outside. His horse rears because of what is going on inside. Yet, Jean Luc prefers to blame the mysterious and multiple hoof abscesses for the rearing! His training is about teaching movement or tricks and when that does not go well he teaches rearing behaviour, which he obviously does well.
Jean Luc is like so many trainers. If you read his web site, it makes for a good read. He makes lots of statements that are hard to argue with. He produces physiological facts that support of his concepts. He makes appropriate references to past master that back up his ideas. He makes a lot of the right noises. But when you see him working with his horses, you realize he has nothing but words to offer his horses. It becomes clear he doesn’t even understand his own concepts. It’s just white noise. What he says and what he does have very little relation to each other.
So my question is, how do people like this get a following? Another mystery I will die never knowing the answer to.