http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQUMAJCh1fA
Has anyone seen this?
Ugh. Yes. I’ve seen it.
This woman was a pony club trainer in my neck of the woods and she sadly turned a few little girls off of riding by insisting they not ride their horses and spend time with them doing other things. Now, of course, there’s nothing wrong with spending time with your horses, and I think that more horse/human relationships would benefit from just “togetherness” time vs. riding time. But, come on, little girls love horses and want to ride and have fun. And if you turn little girls away from riding, the “hanging out with your horse” is only going to last so long, and then you lose future riders/handlers/owners/etc.
Don’t get me wrong, I DO get what she’s saying, and I do think that some of the handling and “relationships” shown in that video are lovely. At the same time, not everyone who rides is a barbarian. Not everyone who trains does so only with visions of ribbons in their heads that will cause them to do evil things to their horses.
I guess as a back-yard horse owner who loves her horses and takes really good care of them, I take offense at her approach and it makes me defensive because I don’t think that everyone is like that. I think she purposely showed only the dark side of things (and I know it gets darker than what she showed). There ARE good people in the horse world too, even if she doesn’t know them or didn’t choose to show them in her documentary.
I know where her farm is. I remember when she was saving up money to make this documentary. I remember when my little friend who was so horse crazy and a good little horse-woman in the making tried to do what Stormy suggested and ultimately it didn’t work because her horse was too much for her so she ended up selling her horse and getting out of riding and the family sold the farm. It made me sad for her and I felt like she got caught up in the confusion of working with someone who also had an agenda.
I think it is true that, most often, people need a certain level of experience before this sort of thing is going to mean anything at all to them. Usually, after they have tried struggled for years to do well, only to wind up questioning what they are doing and why.
