10/11/2026
So true
Hunters were designed to mimic the challenges of the hunt field, testing style, brilliance, and natural ability. But according to Geoff Case, USEF R Judge, trainer, and clinician, today’s hunter ring has strayed far from those origins.
“Every time you change something and it makes something more difficult, it makes it harder for the horses to go around like that,” he said. “I feel like the hunters were creating dressage with jumps in the way. Essentially it’s the same eight-jump pattern everywhere you go.”
The result? A discipline that increasingly looks like performance art, polished, robotic, and predictable, rather than a sport designed to test horse and rider.
Case believes hunters have become overly rigid in penalizing anything that deviates from a narrow picture of perfection. Cross-cantering, missed lead changes, even headshaking are all faults that weigh heavily on a score. “It was supposed to mimic the hunt field,” he noted. “And now it’s something else entirely.”
That rigidity discourages brilliance. Horses are worked until they are flat and expressionless, their personality stripped away to avoid deductions. “To be crisp and jump their best, they need to be a bit fresh,” Case explained. “But we’ve worked the brilliance out of them. You take the personality out.”
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