Charlotte withdrawing from Olympics?

[Sticky_Situation]

It’s great that you crawled out of the womb as a perfect horseman and have never used a whip in any circumstance.

Most of us aren’t as perfect of horsemen as you, and while we haven’t done what Charlotte is shown doing in the video, many of us have done things to our horses that we later realized weren’t fair. And many of us have tried to learn from those experiences to do better.

That doesn’t mean anyone should get a pass for inhumane training or have no consequences. But if you don’t allow the opportunity for someone to reflect on what went wrong and how they can do better by their horses going forward and give them a chance to act on it, the vast majority of riders are by your definition irredeemable.

[Mondo]

@M1ssmouse

2 wrongs don’t make a right! And I hate the commentators saying ‘we’ve all done things we regret’ actually no, I’ve never in 45 years taken a whip to a horse in any situation, stop trying to make yourselves feel better!

Good for you, really. I applaud your restraint. I’m not trying to make myself feel better, I don’t feel bad. (I feel bad for Charlotte) but I myself don’t feel bad, and yes I have done things that I regret. Doesn’t mean I still do. The air must be really fresh up there on that high horse of yours.

[Annie_s]

I was there. It was wonderful.

[PaddockWood]

@Old_Mac_Donald

And yet Reiner himself came under scrutiny on this board, where a poster wrote that they witnessed him using very harsh warm-up methods at a show.

I remember that post too. She said she saw Reiner whip a horse and not once. That is what I recall. I was in shock and still want to believe it can’t be true. I hope that person posts with their recall of exactly what they remember.

[PaddockWood]

@M1ssmouse

2 wrongs don’t make a right! And I hate the commentators saying ‘we’ve all done things we regret’ actually no, I’ve never in 45 years taken a whip to a horse in any situation, stop trying to make yourselves feel better!

I’m actually quite impressed you’ve never once struck a horse with a whip in your lifetime of riding. I mean that. I also don’t understand hating the comments from those of us who do have regrets in any way getting mad. How does any of that make us feel better? I really don’t understand.

P.S. I am NEVER here to fight. Just learn, share, grow. So that is my agenda.

[mmeqcenter]

@Vindicated

The horse is not actually getting contact with the whip and it is making sound, or hitting the kick boards.

I thought so at first, but, after watching closely multiple times, it’s a lunge whip with a long tail and the tail is definitely hitting the horse. Many times.

Just a personal thing, having been launched from a trainer’s stallion when she cracked the lunge whip behind us when he was being a pickle about a walk-canter depart… I don’t ride with trainers who want to walk behind me with a whip of any kind while I’m mounted. I know it’s a common dressage thing, especially for starting half steps, but I cannot allow it, my brain implodes. And this poor guy, wow, what a saint (more likely poor defeated soul) to not have done more than a kick-out every time he got cracked with that whip. My mare would have absolutely sent me to the moon with the first snap.

@Amordoro

This has been my thought, and a frequent topic of discussion at my barn, since this happened. I have a fairly strong feeling - not from personal experience, though I ride with a trainer who has trained many horses to successful (not international) GP careers - that it is not possible to get a horse to successful international dressage level without at least occasionally engaging in practices that non-horse people, and many amateur types, would find very troubling from an ethical or animal welfare perspective.

@GraceLikeRain

I agree that most of us have very little idea of what is done/required to develop an international GP horse and that much of it would make a person cringe.

Been kind of thinking this a bit for a couple years now - for all upper-level disciplines, not just dressage. English and Western alike.
16-year-old me wanted to be an Olympic show jumper soooooooooo bad. 36-year-old me is incredibly happy to just have my girls coming home again to be in my backyard.

[Old_Mac_Donald]

Thank you!

[skydy]

So this guy gets an FEI yellow card immediately because of this photo (sent by PETA), but the FEI has had photos of Werth and Kittel’s obviously distressed horses for months, and has done nothing.

[jvanrens]

@skydy

So this guy gets an FEI yellow card immediately because of this photo (sent by PETA), but the FEI has had photos of Werth and Kittel’s obviously distressed horses for months, and has done nothing.

Assuming this is the same horse, the pictures were posted by the breeder. PETA didn’t have to look too hard.

CDJ withdrawn from paris

[skydy]

How they got the photos isn’t important, to me.

The FEI has been aware of Werth’s and Kittel’s horses’ distress for months and has done nothing. Perhaps if they do it again in the Olympics someone will get another photo and we’ll see what (if anything) is done this time.

[hey101]

I sent the below to my non-horsey girlfriends (we have been on a years-long 3-way text on any and all life love kids work etc and they both asked me what’s up)….

….This is a tough and sad situation. First and foremost, it has escalated far beyond the reality of the actual video because it has caught mainstream attention. I’ve seen it reported on NBC, CNN and the New York Times! I bet 99% of the public have no idea what dressage is, with the notable exception of Snoop Dogg and his “Crip walking horses” lol And I think it has caught mainstream attention because she was admittedly, the golden girl, about to become great Britain’s most decorated Olympian in any sport, And was widely considered a hero and role model.

Once it escalated beyond the realm of “the horse world”, the general public, who is most decidedly pro animal, is weighing in and big time.

As for the video itself, it’s worse than I expected. I was expecting to see an upper level dressage teacher, tapping legs to begin the teaching of more advanced movements ((piaffe or passage for this thread)), and it was far beyond that. I’m no big name trainer, but I certainly would not have encouraged that horse to go forward in the way that she was doing it and especially with a kid on the horse and the horse kicking out. The kid had a death grip on it so the horse had nowhere to go forward when it was whipped from behind.

Now having said the above, while it’s bad, I don’t think it’s lynching material. I’ve seen similar over the years, and I know people who’ve seen far worse. I have directly had a horse in my care that came from a very well-known and popular top trainer in my area that we spent six months patching up because it got abused so badly at that barn. And another one we had come in another top trainer decided the best way to teach it to learn to Bend was to tie its nose to its tail for an hour. The owners told me that directly!

I guess I have boiled my opinion down to -yeah she f*cked up. But so have we all in our horse journey. Do I think she should’ve dropped out out of the Olympics? No. Do I think she should be banned? No. I’d say start with people like the rider ((Meredith Little for those on this thread- my friends wouldn’t have known the name)) who had freaking grooms at the finish line to wipe the blood off the mouth.

I have the feeling if it were not the Olympics and this had not caught mainstream attention, the FEI would not have banned her. Maybe some kind of warning. I mean, the governing body pretends they advocate for Horse welfare in passing a rule that we aren’t allowed to trim whiskers anymore (the long hairs on the nose) . But bloody mouths and blue tongues continue unabated.

….and then I had to explain the blue tongues to my non horsey GFs. Who were horrified

[Long_Time_Lurker]

@DownYonder

I had forgotten about that passage in Podhajsky’s book and it brought a tear to my eye re-reading it here.

My God - who the h*** thought a freakin’ HELICOPTER was a good idea at an occasion like this?

It’s quite a story, and an impressive testament to the relationship between horse and rider. But my reaction is a little bit different than yours. I was outraged on behalf of the horse rather than being moved to tears. This was NOT a fair or kind thing to do to a horse. Podhajsky is at or near the top of my most admired list, but if he was in any way complicit in putting his horse in this terrifying situation my admiration for him is significantly lessened.
Should this be classified as abuse too? On the part of whoever decided to do this to a horse? Even though in his terror he did not explode and injure himself or his rider or spectators? Should this really be held up as an example of superb horsemanship when it could easily have ended differently? I’m truly not sure anymore.

[Mersidoats]

I don’t think he knew there was going to be a helicopter.

[Sticky_Situation]

I don’t think it’s a good idea to land a helicopter in the arena with a horse and obviously that’s a pretty extreme example, but if we are going to consider it abuse to expose a horse to something that he finds scary and ask him to not run away, we should probably just accept that training horses at all is inherently abusive.

Returning from a trail ride today, my horse encountered a new pile of mulch that he was certain was going to eat him and there was much snorting and tension and he backed away several steps when he caught sight of it. Was it abusive for me, as rider, to put him in that situation? Was it abuse to then ask him, once he’d had a chance to process it for a moment, to step forward again and then turn him back towards it and walk back and forth a few times until he began to relax? There was no whipping or aggression involved but clearly that scary mulch pile caused him stress, even if only for a minute or two, that he would not have experienced had he been eating hay with his friends. Where is the line of what’s acceptable?

[mmeqcenter]

@Sticky_Situation

I don’t think it’s a good idea to land a helicopter in the arena with a horse and obviously that’s a pretty extreme example, but if we are going to consider it abuse to expose a horse to something that he finds scary and ask him to not run away, we should probably just accept that training horses at all is inherently abusive.

Yeah but as you note, a helicopter is a pretty extreme example.
Exposing a horse to something easily experienced in a typical day (like a pile of mulch) that he finds scary? Not really abusive.
Exposing a horse suddenly to something wildly unexpected like a flying helicopter for the sake of a show? Pretty freaking shitty. Now, the rider may not have been abusive in that situation assuming they didn’t know about it, he did the best he could with what he was given. But whoever set it up without telling him sure TF were mentally abusive to both the horse and the rider.

Where’s the line? Mental abuse is hard to define, whether it’s towards human or animal. Not everyone’s brain works the same. Some people thrive on “tough love,” some people completely shut down. Some horses desensitize to something scary if the rider pushes them past it with their head turned as if it isn’t even there, some need time to inspect and think. I don’t think a solid line can be defined in between your examples of a pile of mulch and a helicopter. It would depend on the horse and the situation. Even the helicopter situation might not have been mentally abusive if the rider had been given ample notice and access to a helicopter he could’ve worked on getting the horse comfortable with. But I certainly wouldn’t say that any stress is inherently abuse.

[RedHorses]

Here’s a different take on the comments about the number of times the whip actually made contact. Everyone who questioned that number also said CD’s actions were wrong, so if say half, 12 strikes connected, then 12 hits is undeniably abusive.

Then why do people find it necessary to exaggerate what actually happened in order to get others to agree that CD’s actions were really very bad?

I was thinking about this today after reading yet another holier-than-CD post, this time from some FEI accredited coach who decided that CD had obviously planned this kind of training in advance because “she brought a lunge whip with her” - into a strangers dressage arena, (because no one in the world would ever have a lunge whip just lying around in an arena where people actually train and lunge horses. ) The fabricated from speculation scenarios add more threads of “evil” to the tales people are telling when we really need to strip it back to the bare minimum and condemn that fact. Wouldn’t it be easier to correct issues like blue tongues if it were unnecessary to blow things up into a giant web of evil in order to sanction the perpetrators?

[Old_Mac_Donald]

Our neighbour lands theirs next door all the time. My horses actually chase after the chopper as it goes overhead, bloody stickybeaks.

[Annie_Burton]

In a new podcast episode Anja Beran offered her 5 cents, including some truly useful observations and considerations on collected walk, passage/piaffe, nosebands, flying changes, etc. at the GP/Olympic level. She doesn’t mention individuals but addresses the state of dressage as a whole, (with a corresponding course called ‘Blickschulung’ - training one’s eye - on WeHorse.com)

The podcast episode is in German but can be streamed with English subtitles—not perfect (the captions incorrectly say TASK instead of TEST) but really quite seamless in translation, take a look:

Anja Beran: Traurige Tricks beim Olympia-Zirkusspektakel

[Pico_Banana]

My neighbor also occasionally has a helicopter drop him off. It’s in clear view of the horses. I’ve never seen them have a scared reaction to it.

In contrast, sometimes seeing the side by side and drag outside the ring is absolutely terrifying so . . . .

[Kemosabe]

@Manni01

Well you only think about Charlotte who you obviously cherish…

No cherishing…just recognizing the weakness and fallibility of human beings. All human beings.

For those who are standing on a pedestal…have you never yelled at your kids or spouse and regretted it?..dealt out a punishment that was too harsh (not necessarily physical in nature)…said something in anger you regret?..lost your temper?..how about your dogs…did you never make a training mistake with them…use harsh corrections?

We learn from mistakes, that is our human-ness. It doesn’t excuse Charlotte. It puts Charlotte in context of our own failures, errors, mistakes in judgement, ignorance, ego, anger.