Today was the first day of the courtcase against Christine Wels, the German dressage rider and trainer who has been convicted for horseabuse in a earlier case. CW was charged for the fact that she had beaten her horse with a lunge whip for over 470 times in less than half an hour.
Christine Wels (who in the meantime moved to Danmark) stated today in court “if this is horse-abuse than the whole equestrian world have to be taken to court”
[QUOTE=freestyle2music;3662130]
Today was the first day of the courtcase against Christine Wels, the German dressage rider and trainer who has been convicted for horseabuse in a earlier case. CW was charged for the fact that she had beaten her horse with a lunge whip for over 470 times in less than half an hour.
Christine Wels (who in the meantime moved to Danmark) stated today in court “if this is horse-abuse than the whole equestrian world have to be taken to court” [/QUOTE]
the girls got issues…that’s for sure…
best
[QUOTE=freestyle2music;3662130]
Today was the first day of the courtcase against Christine Wels, the German dressage rider and trainer who has been convicted for horseabuse in a earlier case. CW was charged for the fact that she had beaten her horse with a lunge whip for over 470 times in less than half an hour.
Christine Wels (who in the meantime moved to Danmark) stated today in court “if this is horse-abuse than the whole equestrian world have to be taken to court” [/QUOTE]
OMG that makes me sick…I sure hope she’s wrong on that:no:
[QUOTE=Tamara in TN;3662153]
the girls got issues…that’s for sure…
best[/QUOTE]
And another statement of her “people have to understand that methods used
in higher level dressage are different than the methods used in the hobby dressage world”
I don’t know a whole lot but, I do know that if you have to beat a horse 470 times to get it to do what you want, you need to rethink things!!!
That tells me she sure isn’t working with a TB…because after the first 3 or 4 she’d have 1600 pounds of on-the-offense equine on her hands. And maybe her head.
Her training methods show on her face - Danish TV; http://74.125.93.104/translate_c?hl=en&sl=da&u=http://www.tvsyd.dk/dressurheste-mishandlet-af-tr%C3%A6ner&prev=/search%3Fq%3DChristine%2BWels%26hl%3Den&usg=ALkJrhhuPlZXo-h8zA4lHQHnv_SVe88dfw
Hopefully the judge has a brain and eyeballs to see what it is: abuse. And to see what CW is: an abuser.
:mad:
Is the horse industry in Germany/Europe staying quite on this or have any of them come out against her and her methods?
I wonder if she thinks because no single hit was excessive, that 470 hits in 30 minutes is OK? In other words, she can’t understand that something that may be OK once becomes mentally and physically abusive when repeated constantly with no ‘correct’ response that will make the hitting stop.
It’s kind of like Chinese water torture. No one drop seems to hurt…
FIFTEEN whacks with a whip per MINUTE for 30 minutes = upper level dressage training???
Gosh, I guess I do hobby dressage then, coz I thought the idea was to sensitize the horse to a lighter aid.
Silly me.
OTOH, fifteen whacks per minute, I’ll bet she’s got great upper body strength.
OK. There really is no point trying for a lighter mood.
The woman is crazy. She has fallen into the abyss, where sadism and cruelty to others leaves you hungry for more.
I hope they punish the people who let her have horses to train. They helped to enable this situation.
A pretty clear cut case of asocial personality disorder (used to be called psychopathic personality), complete with all the clever sounding justifications and explanations.
And she knows nothing about ‘upper level dressage training’. She looks alot more like a backyarder than an upper level trainer.
How do you recognise that from a look??
I identify that from watching her train horses, where she stands there with the horse going around her on a longe line and smacking it over and over with a longe whip for what appears to be no particular reason at all.
And when I say ‘backyarder’, i don’t mean someone who keeps horses at home, i keep horses at home, i mean a particularly awful kind of place with bad treatment of horses.
I’d have thought that made the difference between someone who abused horses and thought it was acceptable and someone who didn’t.
Christine Wels rode at one of the early World Cups. The Wels family have been involved with dressage as trainers for several generations.
Wilfried Wels used to be well-regarded as a trainer, back when Bimbo Peilicke was considered on the soft side.
She comes from a background where the horse is a work animal, will do what it is told–or else.
The problem is, she is crazy. Something about power, about abusing a creature that cannot fight back,that cannot tell anyone else what has happened–that obviously is the itch she wants to scratch.
she makes me want to be more than a little sick in my mouth.
Violence is the antithesis of “training” at any level in anything. Dressage is based on “harmony” – how can harmony be achieved by bashing? I sure don’t see how any relaxation and “schwung” could ever be accomplished either. So, it would be logical that the higher the level, the more sensitive and discrete the aids should be to get good scores or have a horse without resistance or tension performing the true movements. She should be subjected to that same treatment over and over and see how it feels.
JMHO
PennyG
I hope she gets some real punishment!!
why do people like that not get it that you can’t teach an animal by beating it? What does it learn? To be afraid of training?
In the video, the horse is side-reined much too tight and going around in much too small a circle, all the while being harassed with the whip. What is it supposed to learn by all that??
Indescribable. But - I have to say I have seen things almost as bad - riders sawing on mouths, hauling on reins with all their weight, working in a grossly overbent frame, spinning the horse in a tight circle, constant whipping, working them in training aids that don’t allow them to stretch. I’ve seen a highly experienced rider get off a horse that was ‘misbehaving’ leave the arena and come back with a dressage whip and lay into it. I once had a ‘noted’ rider work a young horse of mine over cross country jumps and when he refused at a water jump she beat him - he came back to me covered in thick welts - all over his rump, ribs and shoulders. I won’t tell you what I said.
It’s symptomatic of the way many riders view horses and the fact that many judges let them get away with it. You simply cannot get a horse to work truly well with that sort of brutality - and it shows in the arena so if judges heavily penalised riders who train like that - or who have their horses trained like that - it would soon die out.
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