Books with Spirit – Joyfulness between horses and people

This article has been re-written -  see the  following post.   I apologise for my energy being off!

Yeah, yeah, sorry everyone, I wasn’t around last time the FEI pulled this re-naming Rollkur stunt. 

Apparently, last time the FEI looked at Rollkur, a few years ago, they changed the name of what the riders were doing, called it “hyperflexion” and said that the most famous horse trained like this at the time was a ”happy athlete”.  Gee, I wonder what video of  crippled horses they were looking at to think that any Rollkured horse is a happy athlete?

If they think that re-naming Rollkur and hyperflexion AGAIN and calling it Low Deep and Round will satisfy 41,000  people who are outraged about Rollkur, I think the FEI might be in for a bit of a surprise.   Renaming it defused the outrage last time, but since nothing changed, I don’t think that tactic will work twice.  We might be naive (yeah well.. it’s really me… I might be naive… in fact sometimes I even enjoy being naive…) but we are not stupid.

The FEI are hoping to defuse 41,000 people’s outrage by eliminating the abuse that we see have been seeing in public in the warm up arenas.   By eliminating the PUBLICLY seen abuse, they are hoping to defuse this public relations nightmare. 

So how can the FEI be responsible for horse abuse that is not in public, abuse that goes on at home in training? Is it unreasonable for me to ask them to take that responsibility?

I believe that the FEI are responsible, when their judges systematically reward horses with high competition scores, who are showing signs of Rollkur abuse – the very thing that they have described as absolutely unacceptable.  And they have the ability to dramatically reduce that abuse by not rewarding the results of that abuse in the competition arena.   

I believe that the FEI have both the ability and the responsibility to change horse abuse wherever they see it.

But the big key that this is all just a public relations excercise to a public relations nightmare, is that there was absolutely no mention whatsoever of educating judges to look for the physically obvious signs of the horses being abused at home – the horses with extravagant leg movement who cannot walk or hold collection for more than a few moments at a time.  This is Grand Prix and so many of the top scoring horses are getting around with hollow backs and are not collected? 

Hollow backs are painful, physically damaging to the horse and shout out that we need to make our horse more comfortable and less fearful about what we are doing – not at all what I expect from world class competition.

It’s a little difficult to go from this let down to the new project that we think will make wonderful things possible in dressage and horses generally.  But I know that this let down makes this new project even more important.  It won’t be long now, so keep watching this space for details…