Dressage is promoted as the art of harmonious communication with horses, but training controversies including rollkur and hyperflexion have exposed significant welfare tensions.
Dressage at its best represents a welfare-positive human-horse relationship built on mutual communication and trust. At its worst, it involves systematic use of aversive techniques to compel compliance in ways that cause pain and distress. The FEI has prohibited rollkur as a training method while permitting low, deep, and round (LDR) warm-up — a distinction widely criticised as unenforceable. Welfare-conscious riders, trainers, and spectators have the power to create market pressure that shifts norms toward genuinely harmonious training.