Completely agree.
I am not familiar with Katie, so didn’t know she had an eating disorder or that she had volunteered that information on social media. Now I understand why some comments mentioned her weight and eating. Good lord, some people can be so incredibly, purposely cruel.
A few of them sound mentally unstable, too. I hope Katie is self-aware and keeps her place secure.
I’m thinking she needs electronic gates and 8 foot chain link and razor wire around her place at this point. She has posted that she has security cameras around the property. I think she should upgrade that.
If I can’t sleep tonight maybe I’ll go be nasty back to these people in the comments for sport.
I think all of them on Facebook have been deleted. So you might not have your fun unfortunately. Nasty bunch huh?
RIP Seven, finally free of pain little guy 
I don’t agree with KVS on a lot of things, and I don’t really love her “brand”. So I don’t follow 
. But people are quite insane on the internet these days, and anyone with an ounce of media literacy would unfortunately see this coming. KVS’s fan base has always appeared to be people lacking even the basic tenets of pet animal husbandry, let alone farm animals. There’s a lot we can do for dogs and cats (if we even should) that just cannot be done for 1000lb prey animals balanced on stilts.
I think this got away from her, both for Seven himself and also the social media firestorm that has been building. You can tell reality set in for KVS personally as she tried to soft-launch a necessary euthanasia, but clearly what anyone with real horse sense saw coming from a mile away took a lot of ignorant people by surprise. KVS will likely get “canceled”, and should absolutely take IRL precautions both for personal safety and mental health reasons, but I think this will blow over. She may not be raking in the cash as much, but the internet remembers as much as it moves on to new targets.
I don’t think KVS is blameless here, and I think she set the stage for this. But no one deserves the type of vitriol I’m seeing in these comments - she did, ultimately, do something that is unfortunate but necessary and was the best option for the animal. Unfortunately it became a no-win situation as far as the social media side is concerned, and people do love to be righteous at the cost of being right.
Fivestrideline, well said.
Seven was just done.
Periodically we get a lot of public interest in my field and what I’ve learned over the years is that yes, a lot of people are hopelessly stupid but the real problem is a lack of humility. The internet has removed the part of someone’s brain that says hmm, maybe I don’t want to stand up and say something dumb in front of this group of experts in case I look stupid. People genuinely don’t care about looking stupid anymore and a lot of it is because people no longer believe in objective truth.
She apparently does a pod cast and is aware of what people are capable of on the internets. Anyways at least seven doesn’t have to suffer anymore.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DSD-b_TlA6A&pp=ygUNa2F0eSB2YW5zbHlrZQ%3D%3D
Ooof. I’m glad he’s finally pain free. I can’t imagine ever putting an animal through all that he endured. I hope she’ll make better decisions in the future.
I noticed that also !
Better late than never, I guess. Crazy to imagine him living in the hospital for the entire first year of his life. I hope the 15% of his time on earth he got to spend being a slightly normal horse was worth it, and I’m glad he had a dignified end.
One of the VM cases I worked that will stick with me forever was a late 20s mini horse who had orthopedic surgery at Cornell, then came to our clinic for rehab closer to home. The two months she was here, she was fully recumbent laying in her own filth, had to be rotated by staff, and ended up dying of shock as a cumulative effect of all of it. Even as she was actively dying, owner wouldn’t let our vets pink juice her.
Since then, I have a lot less sympathy for owners who refuse to let go and think their animal is a “fighter.” It’s an animal. Their whole thing is to fight to survive. Even humans who attempt suicide talk about the extreme primal fear and desire to live after they had jumped/taken drugs/etcetera.
At the same time, as someone with a moderately large social media following linked to my horses, I know the level of hatred and vitriol she’s going to get over the coming weeks. Ever gotten told you’re a disgusting see you next Tuesday and to kill yourself for treating a tick bite without gloves? -_- I hope KVS has a strong support system to get through it.
I can not re-find it now, but there is actually a news article about this horse being passed around on Facebook (and I assume other social media) today.
I am surprised this was news worthy.
Yikes how toxic and on another planet people can be. Those comments are nuts.
Facebook fed it to me also - its not from a page I follow and I have KVS blocked. The headline was “Premature foal passes away” or something of the like.
I didn’t agree with her decisions to keep him alive, but I also don’t think anyone deserves that kind of response. As unsurprising as it is sadly.
I agree, and the lack of insight seems to be related to the distance they get from seeing their words on a screen and not watching people’s faces as those same words come out of their mouth. It’s a totally different experience, and the writing on a screen comes with no instant censure, but does have a permanent record.
As a lukewarm defense on Katie: it does seem to me that the whole thing got away from her. It’s worth keeping in mind that at the very beginning, she was under the impression that he would be “fine” after keeping him off his legs/putting him in splints. That they were just waiting for the bones to grow, as he was otherwise “healthy”. I think it really started to snowball and kind of get to a place where she was in a sunk-cost fallacy. I do think it’s harsh to accuse her of keeping him alive for the sake of views/money, especially considering how much money she was spending on his treatments.
I’m not a huge fan of her, but I do believe she loves her animals.
She always had the option of keeping him alive without plastering him all over social media.
She elected to publicize his every waking moment.
He was 100% alive for that publicity.
Her entire life is social media. She documents everything with her horses.
I’m not saying it’s right: I’m saying she does it because it’s… what she does. Do I support it? Of course not, I found much of it to be rather morbid and felt like he should have been PTS as soon as it was clear that his legs were going to be permanently deformed. But I don’t think it was intentionally nefarious… for her, it’s just the norm. She shares the foals and everything that goes on with them every year, from my understanding. To me, I think it just escalated.
Finally. That poor colt.
As for the comments, those sort of people are why I don’t belong to Facebook or snapchat or any of those other entities. Most people aren’t complete morons and could be educated face to face. I can see how people could come to believe that there are more whackos out there than there really are, if you believe the internet is a true sample of the majority of society.
It’s too bad that some people are ignorant and cruel. I’m just relieved that the poor beastie is out of his misery. I don’t care about the reactions to his merciful death.
I think your analysis is right. While I would not have made the same choices that she did I can understand that someone who can financially afford it just trundles into the next step, especially when the vets are giving what seems to be positive outcomes (even though I can’t imagine how the outcomes still continued to be positive). Her entire horse life is social media so it was natural to document it all, and I think the social media got way out of hand.
I think she finally got news after the latest surgery that was actually poor and then a colic just kind of sealed the deal. Which makes me think that before then the word from the vet was that this was manageable and acceptable. You could tell that the posts swung pretty hard after that surgery.
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