Indeed. What, exactly, is abuse, and WHO gets to define it? When is using a whip (for example) okay, and when does it cross the line? WHO gets to decide that?
When my last boarding barn sold, I moved to a friends place. Very, very backyard-ish. By COTH standards (and even my own), I was… let’s just say it’s been a very long time since I kept a horse in any sort of ‘backyard’ type situation. We have stalls, a good arena, the bare-bones basics are there. I’m on self care, but I had to and still do, swallow my tongue really hard about how other horses are managed. My BO’s response to others’ regarding feed is, are they all at appropriate weight? Then they’re fine. Yet I can see the stress in their eyes when they are tacked up hours after their last meal, not allowed to have anything until after they’ve been worked, and some days it’s so darn obvious (to me) that the under saddle argument never would’ve started if horse had been allowed a pound of hay before it’s ride.
So is that actually abuse?? Depends on the eye of the beholder, I guess.
A farm I used to drive by every day kept horses out on a grazed bare pasture, usually no hay in sight, sometimes the only water was a seasonal pond (and many times it was pretty scuzzy before I’d see an actual water trough), and then there would be foals! On mares that were skin and bones. The pasture was also full of junk - pieces of sheet metal, barbed wire… I called a friend, and old-timer friend, who has more familiarity with turning folks in than I do, and talked to her about it. Her comment was that just because “our” horses would kill themselves in that situation, didn’t automatically make it abuse. I did stop and talk with the neighbors of those folks once. They said they’d tried, but had not made any headway.
Anyway, getting a little off there… but back to my original statement: WHO gets to define the line between okay and abuse? Because it is in many ways subjective, and subjective = opinion.
