I really like the term “clickbait”
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Unfortunately, SW wants attention and bad attention is better than no attention . Frankly, she’s a boring subject. I realize a few posts are necessary to let others know about her hate and bullying, but how about counter acting her comments about her “victim” of the week and stress why Brittany Fraser and her horse are so deserving of their accomplishments.
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That’s what annoyed me about this instance - not so much the same old garbage from DH because I don’t expect any better from her. It’s the fact that other people see the crap she posts it and just take it as gospel with no knowledge of what a nutter she is and zero knowledge of whether the rider in question deserves to be roasted. A bunch of those people then get all upset about what they think is abusive riding based on 6 screen shots pulled from a 2-year-old video, and fill Equestrian Canada’s page with their outrage. Please people - spend 10 minutes of research and work on your critical thinking skills. Seeing it on the internet does not make it true! [headdesk]
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No thanks I think I will pass. is that not the place that posts things about the Maestro? I figure if a place thinks he is worthy of posts I will pass. 
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I watched a Video of Brittany and All in? I believe, hardly worthy of trash talking.
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Horses put themselves into all sorts of weird positions when they don’t want to do something, and riders sometimes have to hang on for dear life when they do. You can get these sort of pics in any warmup, but you can’t often get a video because the video shows what happened, and how small a deal it is.That’s why people like SW show pics instead of video.If there were a damning video you bet you’d be shown it.
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I don’t think the Canadian national team has much to worry about from the DH fb feed. Everyone in the riding world knows about her.
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The fastest way to get banned from DH is to post the full, unaltered video of one of her targets. There was one video where she really slowed down& cropped it so it looked like the rider and horse were having an all out fight/tugging match mid-test. Horse’s head was inverted, teeth barred. It was ugly. On the real video, the head toss was less than a second … a momentary flick in under a stride. The rest of the ride was soft and harmonious and it really just looked like the horse was flicking a bug. But hey, slow it down and cut off the legs of the horse so you can’t see what the actually timing is and suddenly it’s abusive riding, especially if you just loop that moment over & over again.
DH literally removed the full video and banned me within 10 seconds of me posting it. So basically she’s a manipulating, lying fraud who has it out for some riders. Best thing to do is point this out whenever she pops up and then ignore her.
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Yes, they will all be fine. But I just want to emphasize the meanness of spirit behind Dressage Hub’s post.
Brittany rides out of my area. She is originally from New Glasgow Nova Scotia where her family has been involved in raising nice horses suitable for dressage since Brittany was a kid. I know some of these horses and none have been trained in the manner described. Brittany boarded and trained out of a local barn and has ties to our dressage community as we have watched her bring All In along beautifully. She is a lovely person.
Brittany recently received the Elisabeth Brosda memorial award. The story of Elisabeth Brosda strikes a deep emotional chord in our community. You see Elisabeth was an upcoming young dressage rider with a great future ahead of her as both a rider and a professional. She was tragically killed about a year ago in a head on collision on her way to a horse show. She was only 21. The driver of the other car, another young woman with her whole future ahead of her, was instantly killed too. Our community was deeply saddened for both women.
The fact that Brittany was awarded the Brosda memorial award was done with a great deal of thought and our community was overall pleased. The vicious tirade by Dressage Hub puts that decision into question with people responding in the way charactarized by Big Mama — without thought and without critical thinking. People will be people unfortunately and will respond in a knee jerk fashion. That is sadly the nature of the Interwebz. 
The thing though is that the owner of Dressage Hub was not inadvertent in her actions. She was deliberate in selecting and crafting her tirade, reveling in the negative comments and eliminating those that she did not like or were contrary to her position. This kind of behavior exemplifies the meanness of spirit referenced in the beginning of my post, particularly with respect to the Brosda award. I found the DH tirade to be an affront to the memory of that lovely young woman who died and it was done deliberately. How is this remotely “awesomeness?”
My reaction was at first visceral…so I sat on my hands (yup, no more contributing to click bait). I have subsequently posted on my personal FB page a recommendation for people to reconsider their membership to DH and support of it as click bait. Many of my FB friends are part of our local dressage community and reaction to that post thus far is positive, including friends who are also EC staff. It is a little part that I could do to create awareness.
Now everyone…go see your ponies and have a great day. The weather is warming up here in the Ottawa valley and a ride beckons.
P.S. I mentioned earlier that I took a clinic with Brittany and that the welfare of the horse comes first. Yup, and I too have that on video.
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Unfortunately not everybody, I picked up on the dh pictures on my facebook feed, it had been shared by a well known rider and Trainer in the UK who had shared it. I sent her a link to the original COTH thread on dh but it still wasn’t enough to get the post deleted, although comments were eventually closed.
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This is disgraceful. There are enough bad riders out there, People just need to stop giving DH any feed back. Eventually no one will go to her site. well at least the folks that know better. Who is this rotten egg anyway??
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Because DH started with some collaboration with Florida BNT, it may still be followed casually by many people who liked one of her borrowed videos once. Most people don’t monitor their feeds that closely to know when there is a train wreck.
I hadn’t even heard of DH when the thread went up last summer and was interested entirely because she was moving her home base back to Canada and starting to attack Canadians.
We have a tiny population compared to the USA and much less tradition of battling things out in public so I am curious to see how this plays out.
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I hope so!
It’s like throwing a pebble into a pond , you can’t be sure what the ripples will touch, or put the genie back in the bottle (to mix metaphors lol )
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[h=3]Susan Wachowich[/h]
“FEI DRESSAGE RIDER”
https://susanwachowich.wordpress.com/
(generous use of air quotes"
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Problem is there are thousands of people who follow her and don’t know better. They believe what she posts and then repeat it, to others and on social media. Sadly in today’s world if you hear / see something often enough it gets widely accespted as fact.
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A quick google search on her name should tell you everything you need to know
I think the correct spelling of her name is Whatawitch.
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Or Wackowitch?
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Even better :lol:
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I wouldn’t know her real name if it weren’t for COTH. I certainly never saw it on the DH page, which I used to follow, as it used to have interesting videos which were purely observational, not attacks.
It’s SO easy to get a boatload of horrible pictures. Get the wrong time in the stride in canter, and you’re likely to get a horse behind the vertical and croup high. Get the wrong time in trot and the horse looks horrible. If a back is actually swinging, the right/wrong timing can make the horse look super dropped behind the saddle.
I took about 1200 pictures at the Debbie McDonald symposium we had here and on first quick pass reduced to 20% just because the rest looked horrible. And that was a symposium where the rides were pretty much all lovely, and I was only taking photos when things were going well because the whole point was to try to get rider and horse friendly positive photos to share. Pros probably take fewer lousy photos, but I had a LOT of bad ones I deleted! I agree that videos give a better image of the whole. You can’t get GOOD photos if the good moments don’t happen - but EVERY horse has really ugly photos if you get the timing wrong.
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