22/09/2024
Open letter to the horse industry...
Dear horse industry,
Please stop tearing people down!
I saw a post the other day brutally tearing down a friend of mine over the welfare of their horse because of the bit it had in and it's 'stressed' expression.
Now I am not one to dismiss horse welfare lightly; but with recent welfare cases such as the one regarding Charlotte, it is very clear that the horse industry is under scrutiny for its level of horse abuse. All I have to say on that matter is that it's about damn time!
The problem here is that changes don't happen over night. Yes in an ideal world we would all love to ride our horses round bridleless, and have our horses trained to the lightest of touches, but the problem is, most of the equine industry doesn't know how to train this! There are only a handful of trainers that I know that can teach this, and even they will say that it can not be done with just any horse; these horses that we see doing liberty and bridleless riding, most of these are trained from a young age, they will have been picked for their temperament, and will have had years of training.
The sad truth is that it's going to take decades for the horse industry to change.
The industry as a whole just doesn't have the knowledge to change the industry overnight, all we can do is work on ourselves to develop our training methods and decrease the stress impact on our horses; eventually then we may get to a point where our equine partners are completely stress free.
The aspect that needs to drastically change are the competition regulators such as BD and BS, where it is illegal to compete bridleless, and the general expectation is the reliance on a bit and 'contact'. This in itself, in regards to BD, relies on poor training ethics where a contact should be upheld throughout the entire test. This cannot be done bit or bridleless, this cannot be achieved if the horse is in true self carriage.
The other side of the coin is the reliance of the equine industry on financial backing and sponsorship. The drive to win, and produce horses overtakes the welfare of the horse, instead they become a source of income, a commodity, rather than a family member. Time and again I have seen it with children and ponies, parents declaring the pony as unsuitable or not capable and just selling it on; what does this instill in to our children? That again horses are a commodity, unworthy of even having the same status as the family dog, they are replaceable.
But worst of all are the people in the industry tearing each other down without knowing the depths that some of us are trying to go to improve the welfare of our horses. No we can't get it all right overnight. The horse industry has been against its horses for centuries, and just because some pony patter thinks they are better than the rest of us, they think they have the right to tear everyone else down.
These people don't know the harm that they cause. These people are worse than those of us who haven't got it right yet, and that's because they are consciously making the desicion to cause harm. Instead of offering kind words of support and advice, offering to share in their knowledge of how to improve horse welfare, they are deliberately going out of their way to cause hurt, shame and abuse people.
So come on pony patters, show us how it's supposed to be done. Start offering some online tutorials or masterclasses on how to deal with highly strung competition horses; show us how to retrain exracehorses, or horses that have been so badly abused and I mean real abuse, that they are dangerous; because honestly, most of us In the industry are always open to learning new techniques. But the problem is, most of you don't know, your too busy play ponies and hiding behind your keyboards.
