hi liz, its good to have you around still. well done! karma increased! have you seen Gem's karma - has she got the message yet?

hey liz, enjoying the snow?

Far more interesting and enlightening (particularly for poor deprived english riders who've never sat on a QH!) was David Deptford's demo with Paul Hayler at Your Horse Live.
Don't suppose anyone's taken a sneaky vid of that have they?
Anyway, they were comparing and contrasting the outlines and ways of going at all three paces, then explaininf how each trains for pirouettes/spins, canter-halt transitions and flying changes.
Two very different horses, two different riding styles, very similar attitudes to training.
Fascinating stuff, and the audience LOVED Jay's Smokin Story as much as they did the dressage horse.

Having ridden English for decades and still fairly new to western, although had QHs for close to 20 years now, I prefer western!

Had a friend who had a 17.2 warmblood and he was really really dull!! Someone said it's cos their feet are a long way from their brain when they get that big! LOL! He had 3 paces, whereas our QHs have about 8 different paces!

I am having the time of my life with horses since we discovered the fabulous QH and made loads of really superb like minded chums.

O'h Liz it's great to know you are watching over us! Good on yer gal.

LizSwitzer and Curly - my thanks for stamping on the 'them and us' which has cropped up in this thread and which seems to be a recurrent theme in threads on other forums; I know I'm still pretty new to Western but even I can see how the two approaches to horsemanship are non-exclusive; this thread has cheered me up after reading endless twaddle about 'I put a Western saddle on my horse therefore I'm riding Western' sort of stuff ... (Maybe I need to give up the Internet for a few days to recover my sense of humour )

But to get back on topic, I hope the AQHA publishes video of the dressage/reining demo run today at the World Show! I've been loving watching the webcast - watched my first cow events today - ermmm, don't think I'll be aiming to try those then, my coordination is completely up creek, no paddle !!