08/31/2022
Totally 💯 agree ! Keep knowledge, fun and care in the equation
There were plenty of things that I was willing to do with a horse 30-40 years that I wouldn’t ask today, and it’s not because I’ve gotten more “chicken.”
What I gradually have come to believe, and it took me too long to get there, is that horse sports are created by humans and for humans, and the horses are simply the vehicles by which humans measure success or failure.
I don’t feel that it’s a negative thing to ask horses to be athletes, as long as we train them over enough time to allow them to develop the strength and fitness to run and jump without undue stress, or to climb mountains without being pressed to exhaustion, but the problem is “escalation.”
It comes down to the way super obsessed humans buy into the Olympic motto, “citius, altius, fortius” (faster, higher, stronger), and how humans, in that quest for all sorts of things, fame, glory, recognition, money, make it harder and harder for the horses.
There’s a story going around about a famous USA team rider who made the comment before some big event, “I am either going to win this thing, or flip my horse trying.”
We train horses to trust that what we ask them to do isn’t going to hurt them, but then some of us, either by accident or through frenzy to win, betray the trust, and it seems to me that any sport that a human has designed, some other humans can modify in ways that protect the horses while still being testing enough to allocate first prize, second prize, and so on.
But this will take leadership. I don’t think the current human athletes will buy into making it what they might think of as “easier.” The Kool-Aid is flowing too strongly through their veins. They are too hungry, too driven, at the height of their competitive powers, to think through the rights and wrongs brought to the horses they ride. If they did, they’d speak up after so many fatalities and crippling injuries, but they don’t.
Saner heads have to create saner parameters of success and failure, but I don’t see the humans in leadership positions taking much of a possibly unpopular stand.
Remember how humans fought automotive seat belts? How they fought batting helmets, hockey face masks, protective riding helmets? The same tendency exists about horse safety. It isn’t going to be an easy fix with a simple solution.