If you don’t event and wouldn’t ever sell a horse you have bred to an eventer and have little interest in the sport, what are you doing here?
I’m not being smarmy here, either. Event horses have, generally, a very good life. It is not uncommon to see an upper level eventer compete into the late teens, and at the highest levels seeing a horse under 8 years old is extremely uncommon. Yes, some of them do suffer catastropic injuries in the sport. This is a very small number.
If you have no vested interest in the sport why are you here wasting everyone’s time? There are PLENTY of other causes to take up for horse welfare that are far more pressing than eventing.
Go champion some quarter horse futurity forums and ask them why the horses are bred so horribly that many of them are on trucks to mexico before they hit 4 years old. An eventing horse at 4 years old is living a life of leisure, being jumped minimally and being ridden forward on the flat into contact and carefully trained because the upper level eventers know it will take generally EIGHT TO TEN MORE YEARS of careful training and care until they are a contender for the upper levels.
Head yourself over to the big lick forums and take up your cause there.
Journey on up to the dressage forums and ask them why they feel it’s healthy to trap a horse in a stall for 23 hours a day (one hour of turnout, one hour of work) and ask why they think so many dressage horses suffer catastrophic breakdowns that are kept hush hush.
Go visit some hunter shows and try to peek inside the stall curtains everywhere with overflowing sharps containers, good luck trying to go home without picking up the smell of DMSO.
Arabian shows and Saddlebred shows - i will not get into the horrors that go on here.
Why are you jumping on the “eventing is dangerous” bandwagon if you have absolutely nothing to do with the sport?