Endurance.Net Ridecamp Archives

Let me preface what I am about to say here with a number of caveats.  I
do not know Howard; I have never met him; I wouldn't know him if I
tripped over him in the dark, or in the daylight for that matter; the
extent of my experience with his is through e-mail, those public ones
that he has sent to endurance mailing lists over the years and a few
private posts as well.  There are obviously people who know him better
than I do, and, I suspect that virtually everybody who has spent any
time here knows him just as well as I do....which is to say, hardly at
all, especially since he has on at least one occasion (if not more)
confessed to, shall we way, embellishing his stories; so the wise person
will take everything he says with a grain of salt :).

Hence the subject line of this post, everything which follows is just a
guess.

So while it seems to me that Truman has signed up for the cause of horse
welfare and the need to make more rules about the current state of
affairs because he wants the AERC to stop other people from riding their
horses to death, the source of Howard's adamacy about the cause is quite
different.  He wants the AERC to stop HIM from riding his horse to
death, and he is sure that the AERC needs to change its state of mind
and improve its rules because HE has had a couple of close calls with
his own horses at endurance rides....while he was riding completely
within the bounds of the rules.

His attitude seems to be, "if somebody like me, who loves my horses more
than anything can ride my horse/s to the brink of disaster while at the
same time being completely within the rules, there must be something
wrong with the rules."

He is, in fact, desperate for the AERC to come up with some system so
that he can safely ride his horses in endurance and never have to worry
about riding them to death, just so long as he complies with the rules.
He is worried that if the AERC doesn't change its ways that the next
dead horse is going to be one of his.

So it may be that Truman and Howard are asking the same question, "How
can we come up with some rules that will keep Howard from over-riding
his horse?" (Since, I think, Truman, unlike me, DOES know Howard :)).

Why, you ask, did I decide to delve into the realm of speculation in
this way? And why did I decide to do so publicly on Ridecamp rather than
privately to Howard (and Truman???) instead?

Mostly because, while Howard has been the most vocal about this, like
him, I don't believe that he is alone.  That, in fact, there are lots of
endurance people (not just riders, but vets as well) who are just as
desperate to come up with this system, and for the same reason.  They
don't want to be responsible for the death of a horse.

But here is where my speculation and guessing stops.

As much as it pains me to tell you, I can state, unequivocably:

There are no such rules.

Do not deceive yourself into thinking that if we just "do something"
that that will make every horse safe.  It won't.

For years Ridecamp has had the opportunity to watch Howard's story
unfold (no, I won't go back into the archives and cut and paste), and
from the very start what we have seen is a disaster just waiting to
happen.  His early stories of fast performances just waiting for the
chance to gallop down the trail in pursuit of "My Gal Val" caused us to
cringe.  And several people warned him that he was on a collision course
with disaster.

But for some people his stories were funny and or entertaining, and in
person he is probably a likable chap.:) So he relegated those people who
warned him to the "they just hate Howard" club, and dismissed their
warnings.

In his first fifty mile ride he did, indeed, gallop down the trail in
pursuit of, while it was not "My Gal Val" it was, admittedly a couple of
veteran and accomplished riders who knew the trail...and he collided
with disaster.  Due to the heroic efforts of somebody else (the
treatment vet), his chestnuts were pulled from the fire and,
fortuantely, he went home with a live horse instead of a dead one.

And the members of the Hate Howard Club, shook their heads in dispair
and said to themselves, "Yep, saw that one comin'."  And some of them
said it to him, but that just reaffirmed to him that they were part of
the Hate Howard Club and could be dismissed.

However, the Death Visits Ridecamp experience was sobering.  He was
chagrined, he was despondent, he was contrite, he would never do that
again...and like now, he was desperate. "Just tell me what I should do
so that this will never happen again."

Unfortuanately, if you ask me, he got some very bad advice from some
well meaning people, and that advice was, "You need a different horse."
And the lesson that he took home from that was, "The problem is not me,
the problem is my horse. My horse is not right for this sport. I can
continue to do what I am doing, I just need to do it with a horse that
is more suited to it."

After Ridecamp was relegated with the stories of the new horse
(seemingly being ridden in the same way, mind you), the Hate Howard Club
warned him again that he was on a collision course with disaster, but
those people are irrelevant now, can't they see that he is a changed
man?  He has a more suitable horse.

I don't know if Howard is on a collision course with disaster.  Some of
what he says makes me cringe as he doesn't seem to have learned a thing.
But then I hear the story of what happened with War Cry.  And I don't
know about anybody else, but for me this was a success story; although,
I don't think even Howard sees it that way.

It seems to me that the lesson he took home from that was, "I was on
what everybody has told me is a suitable horse, conditioned for the
effort, going slow like everybody suggested, and still, out away from
camp my horse got into trouble, and still I could have killed it."

However, for me, the flip side of the story is that he was sufficiently
attentive the the attitude of the horse that despite the fact that it
had passed the vet check and condintued down the trail AND he wasn't AT
a vet check waiting for the vet to tell him that there was something
wrong with his horse, this one he did NOT ride to the brink of disaster,
but rather recognized some early warning signs, got off and carefully
led the horse to help where it was treated for discomfort with a fairly
mild (although not totally innocuous) pain killer, and recovered without
further intervention.

The lesson he SHOULD have taken home from this was that, in this
instance, it wasn't the treatment vet who pulled his chestnuts from the
fire when he had over ridden a horse that had given him several early
warning signs, but rather his own attention to the detail of the
attitude of his horse in paying attention to the early warning signs and
not having depleted the horses resources to the extent that the horse
couldn't help itself.

It wasn't the rules, and there is no rule, that kept Howard from riding
War Cry to death.  It was Howard himself.  But it seems to me that
Howard (and a lot of other people as well) hasn't figured this out.  He
(and a lot of other people as well) are still looking for a rule.  There
isn't one.

Actually, there is one rule that the AERC could implement that will stop
horses from dying in endurance rides:

"1.    No horse may start."

For those of you who are looking for a rules based solution....this is
it.

This, of course, will not stop horses from dying, it will just stop them
from dying in endurance rides.

kat
Orange County, Calif.



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