30/07/2024
“You need to whip the horses really good.” - direct quote from a 5 year old me in a family video where I was riding around on a toy horse.
Harshness to horses starts young.
I was the pictured tiny shrimp of a child when I was already becoming desensitized to the idea of hitting horses.
From there, a many year conditioning process resulting in me becoming a child, then teen, who would witness people kicking horses in the gut when the horse was “bloating” during girthing, beating horses with the ends of their reins or whips, bloody spur patches on horses’ sides and much much more and I truly believed it was normal.
This wasn’t just within one barn, or an isolated group of people, it was at friends’ barns, horse shows, clinics, expos… virtually anywhere you could find a horse.
It felt normal because so many people were doing these things right in front of me, entirely unchecked.
I was encouraged to participate in violence against horses, too and I learned that the only means of stopping unwanted behaviour was through physical punishment.
Misbehaviour was to be met with kick, smack with a whip or a hand, chasing the horse backwards with a lead rope or any number of means of hitting or scaring a horse by behaving just like a predator.
Seeing it plain as day documented on film like I could in family videos turned my stomach.
This cute little kid, who truly did love horses and did not want to cause harm, not even knowing that what I was saying and doing was harming horses.
When it starts from such a young impressionable age, even as you get older, it becomes really hard to see the way out.
You genuinely cannot even fathom another direction.
Even when you DO hear people call out the cruelties of harsh physical punishment, you’ve been conditioned to view those people as soft “push over” types with ill behaved horses, regardless of evidence.
It’s a seed of violence that gradually grows strong roots that grasp your psyche more and more each year, making it hard and harder to break free even as you become more capable of critical thinking with maturity.
It is SO hard to unlearn later in life.
There is so much grief, guilt and shame involved with admitting that what you believed was the “right” way of doing things was actually causing harm.
It is a lot easier to double down and remain unchanged, especially when your peers, role models and many in your inner community not only enable it, but also encourage it.
If you do change and condemn what you used to be like, you anger those close to you who aren’t ready to look at if what they’ve been taught to do to horses is harmful.
They cut you out and resent you for openly being against things that you once used to accept and believe in… alongside them.
It’s lonely and ostracizing, until you find either a new sense of self that you can strongly grasp or a community but, ideally, both.
And withstanding the grief, shame, guilt and loneliness on your own in the meantime can be painful enough that you just go back to how you used to be.
Or, give up, and leave the horse world entirely, even though it’s not the way you actually want things to be.
Having to completely reimagine who you are as a horse person and the role you play in the horse world is a really scary thing.
Starting anew, having to see the horse world through new eyes that can’t really unsee what you’ve learned, especially the more you progress.
It is a curse that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
I often wonder what it would have been like to enter the horse world with different role models and teaching methods, seeing horses entirely differently from the beginning.
Everything would be so much different.
Frankly, I believe everyone who loves horses deserves to be introduced to them in a manner that emphasizes ethical training and proper care of them.
Good animal husbandry from day one and science based training processes.
Not only would the horses be so much happier, the humans would be abundantly safer and I would guess, also happier, with the relief of no longer holding toxic mindsets that promote harshness and impatience in training.
Things could be so much different than they are.
I want to help create the world where people can learn how to approach horses with kindness from the beginning and follow evidence based approach with them.
Kids don’t want to be mean to horses. They’re taught to be.
Then, they become the adults who teach others to do the same.
