Exactly right! I can’t imagine either of the two I rode with doing this.
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Well, the USEF is going to have to figure out how to pay all judges as full time employees, since these rule changes, if passed, will make it impossible for a judge to have any income outside of judging.
Any horse sold or trained by a judge? How far back does that go? Let’s say my trainer bought a weanling from Lilo Fore 15 years ago. Said trainer trains and competes that horse, then sells to me. Does that mean that horse can never be shown under Lilo? No definition to if there is a statute of limitations for horses sold by a judge. What about before they became a judge? What if I bought a horse that at one point in time, 3 owners ago, was ridden in a several day clinic by a particular judge? I would have to track that history, and make sure show management did not schedule my rides under a particular judge? That sounds insanely complicated to track and nearly impossible to enforce.
I agree with those who say this is likely a poorly thought out rule stemming from another discipline with more substantial issues than dressage and an attempt to unify rules about officials across all disciplines.
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I kind of hope they institute it so I can sit back and watch.
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And every other judge who also clinics. Or breeds. Or trains. Or boards Or does ANYTHING ELSE but judge.
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Well that shot right over your head lol
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Well there have been threads about that for a few years now…and in this forum.
it feel as if this rule will result in only certain Ammys with conventional , non-equine, 9-5 jobs will be able to judge.
so I have been around long enough to wonder if the fact that I bought a horse from a trainer / judge in the 1980s now means I could never show in front of them again.
what problem ( or who ) that this convoluted rule is trying to rein in. All the efforts to get around the Ammy rule through the years ( sometimes bragged about) has resulted in that rule mess.
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It has been a dream of mine that the USDF would shake off the shackles of USEF and become the NGO that it was meant to be.
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Won’t happen while the road to Olympics is through USEF
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My tongue was so firmly lodged in my cheek that it must have gotten in the way of Maximum Clarity! Just goes to show that even adding a smiley face when you talk about offing a seller can’t always help on this board. 
The good news is it sure sounds like a genuine oversight that is being addressed. Hopefully all the drama llamas will be unsaddled and put back in their llama stalls
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I totally agree that the rule as written isn’t likely what they meant. The problem with rules is that when they’re written poorly like this section, it doesn’t matter what they meant, the rule will have to be applied and enforced as it was written. Which will have pretty bad impacts.
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They have a current rule that says 30 days. Wouldn’t the easiest thing to do be to just expand that to 6 months or 1 year?
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Why not just leave it alone?
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Is there a spot on the website to see the comments that other people have made?
Honestly, for clinics that could be problematic. Also FEI limits it to 90 days so there’s not any good reason to be more stringent be than the FEI and some good reasons for the lower levels (non FEI) to be more generous.
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Have you read the rule? It really needs a rework and I’m guessing the intention was to keep the core 30 day requirement but get rid of all the loopholes, but the draft wording wasn’t optimal (or to be exact, ONE word was problematic).
For those of us who have worked insanely hard to clean up poorly written policies and contracts and then had to face questions along the lines of “WTaF did you mean when you wrote this?”… Well, I feel for them. BTDT. You need thick skin and I never even had the joys of the internet drama llamas passing judgement on my well intentioned hard work.
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I agree, it does need some clarification.
However, clarification does not mean wholesale change without working through the consequences. (I would be fascinated to know what incidents prompted this sudden zeal, and I’m betting it’s got nothing to do with dressage.)
I would assume that one would pass it by some kind of informed editor (like the odd judge in each discipline, maybe? It isn’t as if its just been the internet hoipoloi that have dragged out the pitchforks and torches, after all,) before one threw it out for general comment… especially in the modern world.
(And yep… I have rewritten by-laws and policies and procedures so I do understand the pain!)
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But really, if you read through the rule, how many core points have changed? A lot of extraneous stuff/loopholes were deleted, but most of the the 30 day requirements are essentially unchanged but for that one word “permanently” that was added in front of “terminated”. I agree that ONE word is not an improvement on the current rule, but leaving the rule in it’s current state isn’t exactly a blue ribbon solution either.
Also, since you have rewritten things before, surely you aren’t the one unique human being in the entire universe that hasn’t experienced submitting your stuff for review, begging people to read and comment on it, only to find that the time that they DO read/comment on it is well after the assigned time has elapsed. They usually get motivated to offer their opinion in a crowd of people, where it is quite possibly the least useful moment in the entire process to raise these points.
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