06/23/2026
The Hen with the Golden Eggs
Jean Luc Cornille
“Our entire biological system—the brain and the heart itself—works on the same frequencies.”
— Nikola Tesla
The French author Jean de La Fontaine once wrote a fable about a man who owned a hen that laid one golden egg each day. Impatient and greedy, the man killed the hen, believing he would obtain all the gold at once—only to discover he had destroyed the very source of his wealth.
Many horse owners unknowingly repeat this same mistake.
Your horse may already be the “golden one.” Yet instead of understanding and developing the extraordinary potential within the horse, riders often move from one horse to another, searching endlessly for the mythical perfect mount—as if winning a lottery. But lotteries exist for those who misunderstand mathematics, and too often, riders misunderstand physics.
Because riding is physics.
It is the interaction of forces, balance, timing, elasticity, coordination, and the sophisticated orchestration of muscles, tendons, and ligaments managing motion. Great performances and beautiful gaits are not manufactured through force. They emerge from thousands of subtle muscular adaptations—minute contractions, compensatory adjustments, stabilization strategies, and elastic energy exchanges throughout the horse’s body.
Tendons and ligaments store and recycle elastic strain energy, but muscles themselves also participate in this process:
“Apart from the role of tendons and collagen in energy storage, the muscle itself stores and recovers elastic strain energy...”
— Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy (LaStayo et al., 2003)
Sound locomotion is therefore not created through excessive stretching, forced relaxation, or mechanical “release.” In many cases, these approaches actually destroy the horse’s capacity to efficiently manage forces. The result is tragic: a golden horse begins to move like a lemon.
The entire locomotor system must function at the horse’s natural frequency.
“All of these structures must be collectively tuned...”
— Paul C. LaStayo et al.
Driving a horse onto the bit at a cadence faster than the horse’s natural frequency often creates tension, resistance, and dysfunction rather than brilliance.
The same principle applies to the rider.
In clinics, I frequently observe riders with correct intentions and even appropriate muscle tone, yet they unintentionally disrupt communication through the speed of their actions. Muscle force does not switch “on” and “off” instantaneously.
“Muscle force can only increase and decrease gradually.”
— Liduin S. Meershoek & Anton J. van den Bogert
Sophisticated equitation requires reacting early—but slowly.
This level of refinement is rarely taught. Riders are instructed about intensity, but seldom about timing, frequency, and rate of muscular change. Yet horses instinctively protect themselves from actions that exceed their neurological and biomechanical capacity to process information.
I often see horses resisting forward movement not because the rider’s aids are too strong, but because they are too abrupt.
The horse’s flank—beneath the rider’s legs—contains highly sensitive tactile receptors. Excessive pressure, instability, or rapid repetitive actions overload these sensory systems. The horse then “shuts down” defensively in order to cope.
What appears to riders as laziness, stubbornness, or lack of talent is frequently self-protection.
Before killing the hen, wait for the daily golden egg.
Your horse’s heart may already be gold. But the horse’s brain must protect the body from primitive riding and training methods that rush movement beyond the horse’s natural frequency.
The tragedy is not that great horses are rare.
The tragedy is how often greatness is destroyed before it is understood.
— Jean Luc Cornille
