It can’t be all drama and discourse so today I’m gonna talk to you about my favourite horseriding event, the Warendorf Stallion Parade in Germany. Some of you probably know that Germany is very proud of its horses, and often rightly so. And to promote their different studs, the Northrhine-Westphalian state stud farm holds this incredibly strange event where they show off different breeds and disciplines.
That’s all fun and games, right? Some old horse fans watching a few showjumpers and dressage champions canter around for an hour or two.
But this particular parade appears to have a history of just… doing stuff for shits and giggles, I guess. For example, they tend to just toss a bunch of stallions performing wildly different things into the arena at the same time, with no particular rhyme or reason to it:
Why are the draft horses on the ground now? Why is there another warmblood stud in the background lying down? Why did the long-reining guy decide to walk right through there?
The wildest thing about this is that there’s so much going on, the Grand Prix-level dressage in the background is the least interesting thing here.
The opening number is traditionally a jumping quadrille. That’s a concept within itself, but in the context of this madness you’ve forgotten about that part by the time it’s all over.
They tend to show a lot of driving variations, ranging from whatever the go-fast yellow ones (I gave up on trying to look up the names for these)…
…to the german version of the Budweiser Clydesdales
There’s also a part where they toss every other carriage they had left into the ring all at once. It’s a beautiful expression of utter chaos.
And let’s not forget about the in-hand driving! What’s in-hand driving you ask?
Basically, you do dressage while also long-reining a different horse. Is this the point where I have to remind you that these are all stallions?
They also toss in a quadrille of some sorts every once in a while, ranging from pretty normal stuff with four warmbloods strutting in circles to the part where they put their working students on their draft stallions and watch it all unravel
That is not a picture of the latter, the working student part mostly consists of them doing handstands on their horses. The picture just shows the normal draft quadrille.
Then there’s the hungarian post, which is the most unneccesarily dangerous thing to do if you have two horses and not enough money for a proper saddle:
They do this with both drafts and warmbloods, and while the drafts have a steady pace and seem to be relatively easy to balance, the pair of warmbloods barreling through the arena with the poor lad holding on for dear life radiate completely unleashed chaotic energy.
And no one can tell me that this is even remotely useful. Not even photographic evidence could convince me that there was a time when barreling down the road on the back of two unleashed stallions was a commonly acceptable way of getting from point A to point B.
But I have yet to tell you about my all-time favourite discipline. There’s no english word for it, afaik. I mean, why would there be? It’s basically up to half a dozen draft stallions tied together, charging at whatever gets in their way:
This is the Kaltblutkoppel (roughly translates to “leash together the drafts”). Don’t ask me on what kind of mission that poor guy in front of them is, but where he stands is probably the one place you don’t want to be.
I don’t know what this does to show off the stallions, but it’s incredibly entertaining to watch those poor handlers get dragged around by them. I think they reduced the number of horses that are tied together, as well as only showing one Kaltblutkoppel instead of tossing four teams in together. Why? Because they kept getting loose. Who would’ve thought.
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