At first glance, the video of Brendan Wise and Villanueva Conrad competing in a 1.20-meter class just looks like a smooth, fluid jumper round. Then you look closer, and you realize Wise is riding without a bridle, guiding Villanueva Conrad, or “Lyric,” around the course with just a neck rope. 

“Lyric is one of those horses that doesn’t have to go bridleless, but it’s more just a personal pursuit for me to see how far we can take it,” Wise said. “Maybe we can show the world that there’s something different?”

That video, which Wise posted on his Facebook page, has definitely introduced him and Lyric to the world, as it generated more than 6,000 shares and hundreds of comments. It’s been a lot of attention for the professional horseman from Fallston, Maryland, who has only been showing in USEF-recognized shows since 2019, and jumping for just a few years more than that. Wise’s path to jumper stardom went through the worlds of Western natural horsemanship, reining and classical dressage.

Wise and Lyric, a 15-year-old Argentinian-bred warmblood (Covini Z—La Fe Jacamar), jumped clean in that 1.20-meter class during the Winter Spectacular Grand Finale at the World Equestrian Center—Ocala (Florida). It was the finale of the winter circuit for Wise, where he’d entered Lyric in a variety of levels of jumper classes, both with and without a bridle. 

“The more I rode him bridleless, the more I thought, ‘I think we can do this—not just going around 1.10 and 1.15 classes. I think we can do this for real,’ ” Wise said. 

“So I came down this winter to Ocala and had a goal of trying to be more competitive bridleless, to get into bigger classes and bigger arenas bridleless. It didn’t all go perfect,” Wise said. “The 1.20-meter round that’s really traveled around a lot was probably our most competitive bridleless course. He jumped spectacular, and I didn’t make a lot of mistakes.”

Watch that round here:

“We’ve done the 1.30- and 1.35-meter classes, but he’s a tougher horse, and it seems like every time I go in, I just make one critical error that costs us something,” Wise continued. “So that’s been a bit of frustration for me. But it’s the same in a bridle: You make errors. In some ways, if I were to make some of those errors in the bridle, I wouldn’t think anything about it, right? But there’s such a microscope on what we do out there bridleless.”

Wise traveled home to Rutledge Ridge Farm in Fallston, Maryland, content with his Ocala experiences and ready to continue his quest to promote the value of bridleless riding. 

“We didn’t get quite as far as I wanted to but really some of that comes down to money,” he said. “It’s expensive to do this, and we’re certainly not affluent, rich people, by any stretch of the imagination. We scrape for everything you have to make this work. There are only so many times I can show, so I try to maximize what we can do.”

Watch their round at 1.30 meters:

Learning And Evolving

Wise and Melanie Ferrio-Wise, who married in 2015, run a training business together out of Rutledge Ridge Farm. They also perform in bridleless riding exhibitions under the name of Unbridled Wings. Ferrio-Wise first brought public hunter/jumper attention to their bridleless training when she competed bridleless on her horse Wings at the Washington International Horse Show in 2017. 

“What a lot of people don’t know is that we started riding bridleless together years and years before Wings even came into the picture,” Wise said. “Bridleless exhibitions are something I’ve done since the early days of my career, probably 2007. I was doing Western horsemanship stuff with young horses at rodeos and music festivals and expos.” 

Wise got his start in North Carolina working with the famed natural horsemanship trainer John Lyons and his son, reining trainer Josh Lyons. Bridleless work was a major part of their programs. 

When Wise met Ferrio-Wise in 2012, he helped her with a horse she had at the time, using bridleless work to address the horse’s aggressiveness. Ferrio-Wise started performing bridleless with Wise. And then Wings entered the picture in 2015, and Ferrio-Wise wanted to show him. 

“Then it kind of became kind of a passion to take the bridleless work beyond an exhibition, and create something that was viable for Mel and Wings in competition,” Wise said. 

Ferrio-Wise and Wise also began the Unbridled Wings bridleless exhibitions. During those years, Wise was content to be in the background, and he focused his own riding on classical dressage, building on what he’d learned in reining and natural horsemanship. 

“I was discovering about the body and the balance and the mechanics, and building the horse up as an athlete to become stronger because of the work,” he said. “That became the passion that I started to form.”

By 2015, the couple had moved to Maryland and started their training business, attracting a roster of clients from a variety of disciplines. “A lot of my students that were jumpers and eventers who were looking for better flatwork, to understand their connection with their horses better,” Wise said. When his students started asking him for jumping lessons, he decided he needed to add those skill sets to his toolbox. 

“I started studying and learning,” he said “I found that I just absolutely loved it. Applying what I knew from dressage training into the jumpers was just a fascination. Everything that’s involved on course to make good jump courses just became a fun game that I really fell in love with.”

Taking The Bridle Away

In 2021, the couple bought Lyric as a mount for Ferrio-Wise, as Wings was getting older. But that relationship didn’t quite gel, so Wise took over the ride with the primary goal being to ride in the Unbridled Wings bridleless exhibitions. 

“I really didn’t have much of a goal for myself, as far as the bridleless jumping, other than in exhibitions. Showing was really kind of Mel’s thing,” Wise said. “I never really wanted to be in the spotlight. But Lyric came along, and he kind of changed my mind completely. He was so willing and so fun to work with. We saw the impacts he had in encouraging people to maybe search for a softer way, that it can be possible.”

Wise showed Lyric up the 1.40-meter grand prix level with a bridle on, but then he began experimenting with showing him bridleless. 

“I could actually get through to him easier and work the mechanics of his body a little bit more effectively bridleless than I could with the bridle,” he said. 

“It was just so much easier to get more pureness through his body and through his whole entire back up to his poll. It just came more naturally to him bridleless than it did with a bridle,” he continued. “He’d had more than 10 years of being in the bridle, having habits of how he interacts with the bridle. Sometimes those are difficult to overcome. So taking the bridle away and teaching him almost something new really improved him overall. He always jumped well, but when I jumped him bridleless, he had so much freedom in his jump, which just made it fun. It really pushed us both mentally.”

Wise and Lyric got some strange looks at WEC—Ocala when they were competing bridleless.

“We’ve gotten comments ranging from people that are excited and happy to people that accuse you of spooking their horse because your horse doesn’t have a bridle on,” he said. “Or even trainers saying that we have no business being there, or that it’s just a PR stunt. Half the people watching are out there cheering you on. And then there’s the other half of the people, particularly high-level professionals, that are just waiting for you to fail. It’s an interesting range of both positive feedback and negative feedback.”

Wise and Ferrio-Wise went their separate ways personally in 2023, but they still run their training business together out of Rutledge Ridge Farm and perform together in the Unbridled Wings exhibitions. Wise plans to continue to show Lyric bridleless with the goal of competing in national-level grand prix classes while his bridle hangs in the tack room. 

“I want to get to the point where we’re jumping high enough and committed enough that people can no longer say, ‘Is this a joke?’ anymore. I want to show the world that bridleless is fun, but also that there’s a future here, a softer future for horses,” said Wise.