As far as the workers, what they saw, etc. Before we criticize all of them, lets think about the possible environment and how similar it is to situations that ultimately led to SafeSport. Young riders/horse people, opportunity to work with Olympian. He has the opportunity to groom these people convince them that this is ok, this horse is just bad, etc etc as he then probably telling them their riding is improving and no one else offers such a great opportunity. (along with the NDA and keeping their visas âsafeâ on the farm)
THINK how many young women were convinced that touching/feeling were part of a medical treatment. How many were coerced into sexual experiences to keep their connection with the trainer. How many drugs were used across sports. This kind of stuff went on years and deep down these people probably knew something was âoffâ but were afraid. They didnât leave/quit, they didnât tell anyone, (who would believe them) , they tried to cope so they could be successful and achieve a goal
The power person creates an environment and uses whatever tools are available to maintain that environment. Manni01 talked about this in her situation.
If it took that many decades to get to where we are with SafeSport when it is kids at risk, we cant (sadly) expect all this to turn around in short order. But a significant door has now been opened. I certainly hope the FEI and other national organizations start looking harder and creating an opening for people to come with complaints. I hope they penalize more people.
Go research human rights violations in Columbia. He is a member of a vey privileged class in a country that tramples on citizensâ wellbeing. I am sure that the humans and animals are treated equally poorly. Do you think people emigrate from these countries for the privilege of caring for your luxury pet?
When you are young and inexperienced you do not have the tools to handle a toxic situation. Heck, Michael Barisone didnât have the tools to handle a toxic situation and ended up trapped in it. The reporter did not report until he had his visa situation sorted out. He was fortunate that his husband had the resources to assist him.
I am crediting USEF for at least taking the first step. I donât know how you can expect them to help people who are not members. They may not have any knowledge of who is employed. As far as the horses they had no jurisdiction outside of the shows until this rule change was enacted. When a horse is taken off the show grounds for some âsharpeningâ your only recourse is the SPCA or maybe the FEI (admittedly I donât know the FEI rules that well).
What you can do is report and assist. Reach out if you know someone is working for a trainer has a reputation. Ignore cellphone bans and be ready to pull out your phone if you see something. I know without a doubt I would.
This is an emotional subject but rushing to solve the problem is not going to help. This is going to take a calculated approach and emotion cannot be part of this.
Would you treat someone who stayed in a domestic abuse situation so, um, kindly too?
It is now 2024 and we know a lot more about psychological abuse than we did even 20 years ago. Please catch up and quit victim blaming. It doesnât look well on any of us and merely serves to keep those suffering quiet. âI canât speak up because someone will say I am terrible for not speaking up sooner.â 
itâs like tossing a bag of cement into that space between their rock and hard place and adding just the right amount of water to really firm things up.
I think some are conflating USEF and SafeSport. SafeSport is nor part of USEF, and its mission does not include animal welfare. Its targets are the abusers of minors in sports.
The people at USEF, on the other hand, must step up and do whatever they can to address and punish those who abuse horses and/or employees, most of whom (the employees) are not minors.
This. Lets remember that equine drug testing at shows began a long time ago and was in part a reflection of concern for horse welfare. There are blood rules in the dressage world. These are steps, we need them to be bigger or ongoing steps. Probably no easy or perfect way to police the private side but some brainstorming among the higher ups at USEF and their underlying organizations could come up with some ideas. It wont be easy. some people will be pissed off, but thatâs not an excuse to do nothingâŠ
For starters WHY should someone have to pay a FEE to file a complaint about member behavior. That alone turns people off. âWhy should I pay XXX if they wont do anything anyway?â
Not the same. I 100% am not buying what youâre selling. There were plenty of people on that property who were US citizens not on visas and who were paying to ride there or have their horses ridden there. There were plenty of people with loads of agency. There were Champagne-sipping spectators.
Anyone who was truly a victim will be obvious through the investigation. Everyone else needs to be accountable. Making pretend like there was no one there but Parra and a bunch of scared, resourceless victims is disingenuous in the extreme. The only way this is legit is if he and everyone who willing participated is held accountable. The lives of the ones who truly had no agency at all, the animals, demands it.
And I think you need to refrain from making unwarranted assumptions, but here we are.
We were not talking about that subset of people.
Agree, although I think a distinction needs to be made between those who trained with Parra but did not witness âabusiveâ tactics, and those who DID witness abuse and/or harsh training methods that are outside the norm but continued to train with him nonetheless. The second group are for sure the ones who need to be asking themselves some hard questions - and especially if they actively participated in said training tactics (rode or lunged the horses being whipped or forced into unnatural frames either manually or by a device of some sort, or worked in devices that throw them off balance unless they alter their mechanics). I will also include grooms and WS who cared for the horses after those sessions and had to doctor their whip welts, spur wounds, sore and ulcerated mouths, and other injuries caused from those brutal training tactics.
As mentioned upthread, I know several people that trained with Parra and reported no concerns. That was about a decade ago though, which makes me wonder if he has resorted to more and more brutal training tactics in the last several years - although the William incident happened over a decade ago and clearly demonstrated Parraâs tendency even then for extremely questionable training methods.
I am in no way defending USEF!
USEF currently only has rule pertaining to sanctioning horse shows and what happens at those shows. They have no power outside horse shows grounds on licensed days. Because of this, they cannot suspend him of their own power - they have to wait until FEI suspends him or he is convicted of a crime.
There is a rule change proposal in the works to change this to allow USEF to suspend any individual for cruelty or abuse if presented with evidence, even off show grounds. There are plusses and minuses to this - it can be used as a weapon against people because it gives the USEF a lot more power. However, it would allow suspension in cases like this without FEI intervention. So you have to balance the positive and the negative.
Yes, some were showing horses; I believe USEF membership is required by foreign riders.
Eurodressage article on the 2023 US Young Horse Championships. Scroll down to 6yr olds: Fontenay
Câmon Fitz - sascha is not wrong that your posts smell of victim shaming. We all look at people in abusive situations and wonder why they just donât leave. Until youâve been in the situation, judging whys they did not leave or speak up louder or sooner is a bad look. I have done what could be called âvictim shamingâ probably only twice in my memory, and in both cases those people called themselves victims when in fact they were the aggressor.
We talk all the time about young people and their lack of fully formed thinking. Take a late teen/early 20s person from a foreign country with grand dreams of professional success, toss in a domineering boss and that is a recipe for exactly what happened here. Passports held, threats of "youâll never work in the industry againâ, psychological manipulation, etc⊠all adds up. Plus just because you have assumed that the working students have the support and mental fortitude to leave doesnât make it so. I very rarely judge why someone makes decisions - I am not in their shoes, with the baggage of what their lives have been like to lead to the decisions they make.Of course no one should stand by and ignore abuse, but it is often so much more complicated than just âreport and leaveâ.
As far as US citizens - while I am sure there are some who were active participants - other, just because someone comes from financial stability does not equal support to extricate themselves from bad situations. Rich people can make just as sh.tty parents as ones with no money.
At 20, if I arrived at CPâs farm as a working student, I donât know if I would have the guts to call out someone who has had the success professionally as CP. I very well may have just assumed that every farm of that level operates much the same. Toss in a head trainer that tells you youâll never work in the industry again if you leave his farm and it is a recipe for exactly what we are seeing here - unreported abuse of animals and humans. Also toss in years of ignored complaints to SafeSport.
CP probably looked for working students that seemed overly eager, easily intimidated, and with not the best support (family) structure in their home country.
Are you saying all those gymnasts that were systemically abused were complicit in the abuse? Are you saying a person who does not just leave a abusive situation is guilty as well? Because that is how it sounds.
OK, we now know that there have been rumors for years of harsh and brutal training tactics by Parra. Christine Traurig and Robert Dover say they have called him out on it. Clients and WS have kept quiet for various reasons - either they didnât witness abusive treatment or they were worried about retaliation if they broke their NDAs, or they were afraid to say anything because he held their visa, passports, etc.
We also know there has been a long trail of talented horses that have gone through his barn. What happened to them all? Where are they now? What about the hints and rumors of untold numbers of horses buried on his property or elsewhere (or perhaps even cremated or shipped off on trucks to Mexico so he could hide evidence of abuse)?
So what about the vets, farriers, body workers who treated all those horses? Surely they have tales to tell. Did they also have to sign NDAs?
[Edited to add another possibility regarding whereabouts of Parra-trained horses.]
Wow. Sickening.
If youâre living in housing he owns, on his property, where exactly is a âsafe placeâ to keep things?
To add, if you are new to the property and organization, from another country, how would you begin to find among the peope there, anyone to trust to help you?
The individuals who were the âwhistle blowersâ in this recent situation with CP and who live in close proximity to CP have confirmed that they have had to hire armed security due to ongoing threats made by CP towards them. It has without a doubt gotten very ugly.
I agree that there should be accountability with those who contributed towards abuse. But I also believe that CP is a predator and is an individual who would seek students or workers that are in fragile situations in order to take advantage of them. These working student type positions can be very predatory as well. The student is already vulnerable because they are relying on their employer for both their housing and income. Add the complexity of citizenship to that and I can see how these individuals could be abused and totally taken advantage of. Itâs very sad.
Hindsight is always 20:20 and we just do not know the details surrounding those who worked with him.
This is not true of all visa categories. I didnât have to do this when I was sponsored by a US employer. All I had to show was that I had a firm job offer and the employer had to show that they couldnât find an American to fill the position.
I disagree. I think that Parra is the result or symptom of the system and of course needs to be dealt with. But I do think they need to invest considerable resources into educating all of their officials and all of their members about what is or is not abuse before they can enforce any policy or rule. I donât think there is enough invested in horse welfare and that is one of the organizationâs stated purposes. They can put together a panel of vets, farriers and others to develop an abuse prevention program. Here is a simple example of a list of what is abuse done by a vet: https://www.thevetexpert.com/15-most-common-horse-abuse-facts/#:~:text=Training%20Horse%20Abuse%20During%20horse%20training%20use%20of,an%20untrained%20horse%20is%20another%20form%20of%20abuse.
I also think that the organizations have lost credibility with the circumstances of the last decade or two and they will need to gain credibility back by engaging independent third parties to investigate and develop an educational program. Send the message loud and clear of what wonât be tolerated so that any bystander can recognize and report it. Make abuse reporting free and easy to access.
If it were me, being the raging empath I am (believe it or not) I could not physically bear the anguish of watching horses being abused and suffering.
So I see @FitzEâs point.
In all my life Iâve gotten into one physical altercation with a female. She was stabbing rats caught in a garbage can with a pitchfork. They were screaming. I took her down.
Over rats.
Maybe itâs a matter of the compassion and empathy within each of us. Maybe mine is over developed. But Iâd do it again. I canât stand to see suffering.
Iâm thinking of other times Iâve stepped in. Yeah itâs just how I am.
Were I one of those students or visa holders I can only guess Iâd be a whistle blower in the face of CP level abuse.
Would I run to the authorities over something more mild? No. But Iâd never go there again either.
Well, one thing that comes to mind is that the horse does have to display three pure gaits: walk, trot, Cantor. And each one of those has directives. The directives donât demand gigantic Gaits, but do include at least tracking up in the walk, a period of suspension in the trot with two pure beats⊠In the canter, a three beat gait with A period of suspension. So yes, those are still about Gaits⊠So they could have wonderful everything else, but be lateral. Or even doing some sort of gaiter horse movement. The horse doesnât have to have big gaits in order to have correct gates.
It doesnât bother me that those basic qualities of the gaits are considered to be part of the system for judging dressage. If you start with gaits that are correct to these directives, and they become distorted because of tension/poor training, then that gives insight into the qualities that are also judged as the horse was at the levels.
I think it would be possible to put more weight on things that are reflective of training rather than the natural ability of the horse. And I think that would be a great idea. But you canât eliminate Gaits entirely in my opinion.
