I have followed all these threads, but haven’t posted until now.
I will not be offering my opinion on this turn of events, because I don’t think it will add anything. What I would like to do is relate a story of a friend of mine–not to make specific commentary on this incident, but rather attempt to point out that there are a lot of horsepeople in the world who aren’t like us, and thus aren’t necessarily wrong.
I have a dear friend who is an equine vet–she practiced for many years in the Middleburg area and her clients were the creme de le creme of the racing, hunter/jumper, eventing, and dressage worlds. She said 90% of the serious (i.w. life-threatening or life-ending) injuries and illnesses were cause by a conscious decision of an owner/trainer/rider to compete an animal in its discipline–often because the horse “wasn’t quite right”, but often just because of the inherent risk in competition. To be frank, she got tired of putting horses back together, only to have to do it all over again the next month.
So, she took a position in rural southern Virginia–some competitove types, but far more breeding and backyard folks. I spoke to her about a month after she had moved and asked how it was going. She related that it had been a real shock–because 90% of the seriious cases she was treating now were related to “ignorance” injuries. Including injuries realted to innapropriate fencing materials, innapropriate care and in one memorable case, a pony that had been left in the front yard tied to a truck tire, so it “could eat some grass”. I asked her if she was rethinking the move, and to my surprise, she said “Absolutely not!” Her pointwas that while the ignorance injuries were often mind-boggling, the people’s general response when she explained the cause of the injury and how to prevent it in the future was shocked horror that they had done something wrong, and would seek to make amends to prevent futur problems.
“At least these people are willing to learn from their mistakes,” she said. “It’s a lot better to have to treat the same horse for three different ingnorance injures, than to treat the same horse for the same problem again and again, because “he has to go” to the next horse show, event, or race. I’d rather stich up 6 million wire cuts, than have to inject for the hundreth time the joints of some poor old campaigner whose crippled and should be retired, but “has to get Suzy to Indoors”.”
An interesting point, I thought. Regardless of my personal feelings about the ultimate outcome in this case, I am uncomfrotable with a tone I sense in these posts that seems to say "If you aren’t(a)in a show/boarding facility; (b)incredibly experienced or knowleadgable; ©over 25 years of age; (d) have a certain amount of income, etc., etc., you don’t deserve to own a horse. This gets into a dangerous sliipery-slope type of territory very quickly, that I think we need to be careful of.
I am also not quick to write someone off, I still dont know what to believe, I mean… I know what I should believe, but that little loyal, trusting, gulible part of me still wants to say that there had to be more 
