“I think, although it may be well intentioned, it’s an incredibly dangerous narrative for horses in sport or even riding in general.”
Excellent point! We as eventers might need to find the sweet spot between the unhorsey public perspective and equine welfare of a sufficient standard to reduce the risk of horse and rider harm. Also, in the past the public accepted equine sport in movies (it’s a show jumper but it may be relevant) such as the horse with the flying tail.
Here’s another challenge. When equine bodyworkers practice veterinary medicine without a license they can cause harm to humans and horses. Why is that law not enforced?
Also, it appears that people working in the eventing sport sector, as well as those working in veterinary research have to deal with some so called animal activists that do nothing all day except for hunting human beings for simply riding their horses. It’s so ironic that the hunt sab crew are human hunters.
When someone such as myself tries to warn eventers about animal rights criminals it’s best to do it privately. My former boss is so good as a veterinarian and an animal rights criminal group that blew up a professors car in California also tried to target him. The criminals got arrested and jailed in Michigan because they threatened another professor due to his calling out the animal rights criminals on his blog. My boss had to quit the university because they made a web site dedicated to making death threats to him. He is skeptical of all non scientist interviews and he doesn’t give talks anymore except online.
To clarify. Professor A (my former boss in Florida) got a death threat website made of him, the Professor in Cali got his car blown up, professor in Michigan that spoke out against them triggered an arrest. Those goons were so well organized that they operated in 3 states. Please please understand and I’m trying to avoid a shoot the messenger fallacy. I’m aware that this is unpleasant info and some horse people tell me that this shouldn’t be discussed.
So, I think as an event rider myself, and a former pony clubber, that these “antis” as my British friends call them are a huge problem, creating a chilling effect against education of the public from truly knowledgeable horse people. Then we get in a catch 22 of constructive and sustainable identification of problems to be solved in our sport eliciting a type of overvalued ideas in people with psychological phenotypes of being rescuers with a savior complex that find out about the problem.
The terminology of equine welfare is delicate in that it is now in a situation where the concept of pain, in contrast to behavior is driving some seriously pathological reactions in the animal rights criminals.
I call them animal rights criminals because their rhetoric and talking points are clear as day to me. Even if they are bodyworkers, they aren’t licensed veterinarians. Their emotional language is obvious, and they don’t want animal welfare solutions, they want to “set animals free”
Even one vet student in the uni that I worked at snuk into the place where birds were kept and let them all out to a certain death. It’s a huge problem. When I mentioned the criminals to other eventers on fb people got upset and told me that I shouldn’t let the criminals behavior and antics be known because it tells the criminals that they are “landing a blow.” I don’t want our sport to be banned because it’s the last horse sport that allows horses to gallop in a big field rather than be in a stall 24 7 or on a treadmill or horse walker and arenas for work. We have to keep our horses truly sound for eventing, there are no destroyed ambling walks, no overriding cadence, no rollkur etc. I also understand that mentioning those concepts could be harmful if done in public
So yeah I’m a person with autism so I’m just trying to be accurate here because I may be stating the obvious according to some. I’m just concerned and trying to tell eventers that science people have been dealing with it and it is made a million times harder when fanatics dog pile over anthropomorphic pseudoscience because they are so aggressive and have so much time on their hands. I actually joined the ebvma because they were the ones that understood it. We had a zoom meeting and we got hacked during the meeting. It’s exhausting
