Hi, Missed it. Anyone willing to share a summary? Many thanks!
J.
It was long, but interesting. There was no shortage of questions and comments from people who were on the Zoom.
Nancy Jaffer gives a pretty thorough summary of it here.
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“It’s important we seize control of this topic ourselves and look for great solutions,” said Mary. Otherwise, equestrian competition will be in trouble.
She mentioned the film “Black Fish,” about how orcas were treated at Sea World.
“The public rose up, and suddenly the idea of keeping an orca in captivity was not okay.”
What a poor example. Orcas unquestionably should not be captured from the wild, and kept in isolation in tiny pools, and forced to perform for the public. This makes it sound like an admission that equestrian sports are not humane and we need sneaky PR tactics to avoid the public from catching on.
An SLO example that always comes up in connection with horses is the 2021 Olympic pentathlon in Tokyo, where a coach hit a horse who had refused a jump, as the rider was crying. That was enough to end show jumping in pentathlon after this summer’s Olympics. At the 2028 Olympics, horseswill be replaced by an obstacle course competitors run on foot.
I think the COTH community was calling for changes to this portion of the pentathlon long before this most recent incident.
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Yikes.
Orcas (and most large whales) cannot be humanely kept in captivity, and SeaWorld specifically was doing an AWFUL job with their tiny tanks and lack of species appropriate care. Is that what we want to be comparing ourselves to? Is that our standard of care for competition horses??
Not good.
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But to the uninformed public, they see horses the same way. Wild animals who are now kept in small cages without access to large areas to roam and intermingle with their kind. We have to remember it’s not what we see, it’s what the public perceives. Our job is to educate those who don’t work with horses and don’t understand our sport.
We do need to start a PR campaign to educate the general public and help them understand that we are not abusive to animals. But it’s not going to be easy. Animal rights activists have the public’s ear and we don’t.
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This exactly. I get exasperated how lacking critical thinking is these days with the general population, but it is what it is.
I thought it was interesting what Germany is doing by going straight to the youths for educational campaigning–will want to see how that plays out.
USHJA has tried to do this (I think) by bringing in lower divisions, outreach classes, etc. But it’s backfired spectacularly as now we’ve got six figure 2’6’’ horses and even very expensive crossrail ponies. The sport has become even less accessible.
The accessibility of horse sport IMO directly ties into social license. If it’s pay to play, and only the 1% can really afford the sport, then how is the rest of the general public supposed to understand horses, horse welfare, or horse sport? It’s all shrouded in mystery at that point beyond what PETA et al is willing to put forward.
I know a number of folks who have invested in owning a share of a race horse, and one of the surprising side effects of that is all of a sudden these people, who have never ridden a horse in their lives or shown any interest in equines, have shown a new enthusiasm in horses and are learning more on their own about feet and breeding and general anatomy. Not saying we have microshares of show jumpers for sale but I think it’s “how do we get folks to have some sort of investment in what we do.”
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Sure, but she makes a pretty weak argument by using an example where public opinion rightfully led to Orcas being captured and kept in captivity illegal.
When the public sees a sudden increase in racehorse deaths at the track, or bloody mouths/spur marks being reported at top competitions, or a hysterical woman beating her horse at the olympics, are they wrong to be concerned? If we’re going to have a PR campaign to convince the public that horses can humanely be kept in captivity, we need to start by humanely keeping horses in captivity.
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Exactly.
And we need to do so at the most visible levels of the game, racing and the Olympics and live streamed events like Rolex/World Cup/whatever (yes you’ll pry the title Rolex out of my cold dead hands thanks 
). Unfortunately it doesn’t really matter if Regular Horse People keep their animals humanely and appropriately, because the public will likely never see it. Yes, it’s hard to control what cherry picked nonsense goes viral, but perhaps we need to be aware of what we put out there in the first place. If that means reforming safety and tack rules and doing some PR training with our old school rough around the edges trainers to be featured on USEF social media, so be it.
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Absolutely agree. While there are plenty of examples of videos going viral that misconstrue horse welfare, there are also plenty of examples where we’ve done a really shit job of protecting our horses and the public has rightfully taken note.
Sue Lyman noted that the Horse and Rider Advocates committee has tried to address several key matters, including longeing, having horses compete in too many classes, the practice of pulling shoes for under saddle classes. “But what we put forward is always pared down,” she stated.
A commenter who gave her name only as “Sue Ellen” said that while she has been lobbying for years to stop shoe pulling for the under saddle classes, such a rule “has been stopped dead in committee in spite of evidence by vets and farriers that the practice is harmful.”
There was also a conversation about using the equine grimace scale for judging. Some judges are uncomfortable calling out lame horses, so this one will require “a lot of conversation.”
We can do better.
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I’m with you on this one, I am way too old to change things like this!
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As a Chicagoan that has vowed, to the day I die, to continue calling it The Sears Tower, I am inclined to also be on that train. But a solid point was made and forced me to reconsider; and that was that if we want to make the sport more accessible through more sponsorship dollars, we need to at least make an effort to (begrudgingly, if required) use the new name as an expression of our appreciation.
I don’t like it one bit but was forced to admit, they’re right. So Defender 3-Day Event it is, which at least has a bit of a nice ring to it.
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It just doesn’t roll off the tongue like Rolex/RK3DE always did - but I cannot argue with your logic.
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I actually think she made an effective argument- because we as educated horse people know that horses can have comfortable and happy domesticated lives- that we can give them better lives than they would experience in the wild- but Jen Q. Public who has never met a horse and only watched Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron might walk into the barn and see “they’re living in boxes!” and think it’s exactly like keeping an orca in the aquarium.
We do have some Jen Q. Publics come visit our horses (barn is next to a soccer field) so I’ve had this discussion with kids and their parents! “Why is he in a box?” “Our horses come inside to their stalls to eat, rest, and get out of the weather. Most of our horses spend at least half of their day outside moving around and socializing with their friends. Just like us, most of them like to come in to get a break from the hot sun/rain/wind/cold/bugs.” “Oh, okay! Can I pet him?”
And here I totally agree with you. We all need to do our soul-searching and take accountability to give horses the best domesticated lives we can offer them. We have to be able to defend the choices that we make on their behalves with a genuinely horse-focused explanation, rather than one of our own convenience or ambition. In this room full of horse people, I’d assert that if we can’t live that, we don’t deserve to have horses.
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It was interesting.
It’s amazing the animal rights activists have generally left the industry in peace.
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A thousand times this. I have a MyRacehorse share and they do a great job with video updates and accessible explanations (my horse has had recent surgery and is coming back into work from a layoff).
You know what else was awesome? The baby watch livestreams (Foal Patrol)? My non-horsey stepmom got totally hooked on those and was emailing me regularly about all of the science-y and developmental stuff she was learning.
I’m really worried that the easy answer for the industry here is “let’s just mind our language and be aware of the optics at all times.”
ETA: missing ‘s’ 
Yes, that’s important. Yes, we need to do that. But if just worrying about “what it looks like” to the layperson is the only way forward that comes of this, we will paint ourselves into a corner because the Central Park Test goalpost is a highly moveable one.
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Agree! The way forward is education, outreach, and making horses accessible so people can come get to know who they are and how they live.
(And where needed, cleaning up our acts.)
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I might get flamed for this, but I wonder if it is time for USEF to issue a social media rule. I am seeing more and more clips where people pull them out of context and scream abuse!
A few days ago someone posted a clip of a poor rider at a dressage show at WEC Ocala in the warmup. The horse was slightly behind the vertical, but she was half halting and riding forward. This was not an FEI rider/horse. She was still absolutely slated in the comments. This rider had no idea they were being videoed, and I’m sure no idea that it was posted somewhere, where there are 100s of comments piling on.
If a non-horsey person comes across that thread, they’re going to think that dressage is abusive. Social media can be a great asset, but if posts like that continue to happen? They’re more far reaching than the cutesy “two hearts” campaign the FEI did.
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USEF can’t go after everyone that posts something on social media. Aside from the questionable legality of such a ban, it would be a bureaucratic nightmare and financial drain.
Competitive equestrians (the ones actually keeping these beasts gainfully employed and thus existing in a modern world) need to stop calling every. gosh. darn. thing. “abuse”. We are stripping that word of clear meaning and blurring the lines between what is abuse and what is piss poor horsemanship and what is just Not Our Jam. And as we argue about that, the far more organized RARA system will start calling Congress and pushing things through councils & courts.
Case in point: Western Pleasure. Do I dig it? No, I do not. Do I perceive it as being unnatural & awkward? Hell to the Yes. Do I have any experience at all in breeding, sourcing, and producing a Western Pleasure horse? Zero. Zip. Nada. I also don’t know jackrabbits about Peruvian Pasos and they likewise look hella weird to me.
And yet every time some poor WP person’s post mistakenly floats into Tight Breeches land, there are endless comments - endless! - declaring Horse Abuse. What The Actual Fudge are we doing to ourselves.
USEF/USHJA have never admitted that a world exists outside their bubble. And now they’re surprised to find that world has actual power, and simultaneously don’t understand how that world works. We are in desperate need of some cool heads with real world experience. The sunshine & butterflies veneer of public perception is unattainable. They cannot bumble on about this for years, producing absolutely nothing that’s actionable, and expect this industry to survive.
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British Eventing (BE) introduced a social media rule a few years back, stating that people should refrain from posting information about and videos of any falls during competition until after BE had put out an official response. The main response from COTH readers might be characterised as “Freedom of speech violated”, “Officials over reaching themselves” or more basic “I can post what I d*+med want, who’s going to stop me?”. The rule was introduced after a mother on a plane flying home to NZ learned her son had been killed in a cross country fall via someone’s social media post.
How does an organisation impose a rule about social media when it, the organisation, blatantly fails to address the issues that are recognised as problematic by the majority of riders let alone the uninformed but increasingly concerned General Public. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil just doesn’t work any more. Personally, as an outsider, it seems to me that all the American governing bodies need to grow some backbone.
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This is where the cultural aspect of performance horse sports has to change. It isn’t the show that causes the cost to be astronomical, it is the trainers and their programs.
Let’s look at rodeo. Kids from the city/suburbs, can come and to mutton busting in front of an audience of thousands for something like $15. They get to wear the same gear the PBR riders wear and have almost the same atmosphere. Those kids become invested in rodeo and western culture. At the recent National Western Stock Show they ran 30 kids a day for 2 weeks, and the area was sold out (we had to watch from the arena perimeter fencing which was standing room only). Only one kid decided not to go at the last minute and the crowd still gave him a cheer for just being out there.
Where are the pony classes where kids can pay $15 to ride in the GP ring and even jump a 10" vertical on a lead line to a cheering crowd?
The sport is self selecting to an activity only the wealthy do and this opens it up to further attacks and irrelevance. It isn’t just the shows that need to put in the effort to engage the general public but the trainers too. They need to put their effort in to bring in kids who may never understand or experience what we do, and they need to do it at a cost that is affordable to even the lowest hard working family.
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