[QUOTE=frugalannie;6802064]
Guilherme, please understand that I am not arguing herein, just trying to wrap my brain around a very different discipline from what I’m used to.
What if a soundness trot up before a veterinarian and some judges was only conducted at a certain level (championships, let’s say)?
Also, from the perspective of my small sport, why can’t a horse be referred to the assessment panel, DQP or show vet (don’t most big shows have a vet on call for emergencies?) by any official who notices something that might be lameness? It shouldn’t have to be federal law to try to protect any horse showing from doing so lame.
Again, I come from a fragment of equine sport where any judge (dressage or jumping) or member of the ground jury has the responsibility to pull any horse that appears lame, shows blood anywhere including the mouth and have it checked over. Sometimes it’s nothing (horse can be “rein lame” or just stung itself) and sometimes it results in the horse being spun from the competition. I’m so provincial that I assumed this was true for all major horse competitions.
I’m not getting into the “evenly uneven” lamenesses here. Just asking if a frankly lame horse would be permitted to compete.
Oh, and would you please tell me what DQP stands for?[/QUOTE]
DQP means “Designated Qualified Person.” They are laymen trained under a USDA approved program to conduct inspections under the HPA. The HPA also decrees, through Regulations published by the USDA, how inspections are to done. The rules are that all horses are inspected prior to exhibition and the top two are inspected afterwards. This is why a “trotting out” program would be highly problematical.
In a perfect world DQPs would be unnecessary because judges would not reward extreme motion and would excuse cheaters. But the world is not perfect; so we need “outsiders” to do part of the judge’s job for them.
Just how bad can it be? Some years back I was scribing at a FOSH show. A member of the FOSH board of directors was the Show Manager. The judge (now deceased) was a Name in the sound horse/natural horse world.
Another Name in the sound trainer world was campaigning a three year old TWH gelding. This horse was not sored, but was three legged lame. It was so bad that the rider was whipping the horse, vigorously, to get the canter. At one point the judge asked me what I thought about the horse and I said, “dead lame.” He nodded and then told me to call the Show Manager as ask them if the horse should be examined by the show vet (who was on the grounds). My first reaction was to say, “You’re the judge; why do you need the Show Manager’s input?” I mean, if the judge was asking me for a “second opinion” and now looking for third I would think that they had already made a call. I held my tongue and called the Show Manager. They said no vet exam was necessary, it was no more than a Grade 1 lamness. Aside from the issues of “practicing without a license” I wonder just what horse they were watching. It certainly wasn’t what the judge and I were seeing (like 3-4). I communicated this to the judge. He shrugged his shoulders, gave the horse a blue ribbon, and the show went on. That gelding was shown in three more classes and got three more blue ribbons.
At the time I was no “virgin” when it came to TWH shows. To be fair, neither was I a “regular.” I’d seen this story play out at virtually every NHSC show I’d attended (which is one reason I wasn’t a regular; watching systematized animal cruelty is not my thing). That it happened at a FOSH show was deeply troubling for me.
A professional, effective system of inspection is essential if the goals of the HPA are to be reached. No system is perfect and inspectors will always be one step behind innovative cheaters. That’s just life.
G.
TWHs and various gaited horses are used for endurance all the time. It used to be that people had to really explain to vets why their horse was “bobbing his head” while in the trot out. Now vets are doing a great job of educating themselves and learning that gaited horses move differently, so you don’t look for lameness issues the same way as is done with traditional breeds.
