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Re: [RC] Horses/Olympics - LSimoni197

Years ago I was watching a reigning competition in Reno. (Snaffle Bit Futurity). We all knew what the big popping sound was.  This beautiful young mare just stood there on her remaining 3 good legs.
I believe that we might just find that as many horses die from the trailer rides to events as die from competition.  We should never breed our horses, by that one act we most definitely put our mares in a much higher category of risk for dying.
Consider the possibility of any competitor, animal or human, to die at the Olympics due to over exertion, bad feed, terrorism, contagion.
So, we should most definitely sit home, keep our horses in their pasture, or better yet, in a stall, to keep them safe.  
I bet most of you have had horses long enough to know that they will find a way to just up and seriously injure or kill themselves right at home.
Life has risk, and when it is a reasonable percentage we just keep living and doing things.  
We drive cars, fly in planes, ski, swim, ride bikes, have sex, have babies, and ride our horses.
We cannot prevent all horse deaths at home, and it is foolish to think that we could ever prevent all horse deaths at a competition.  Insurance companies consider what is an acceptable risk.  Park Departments across our Nation have an acceptable number of accidents. I would bet that CALTRANS has figures indicating what are acceptable numbers of accidents for any given stretch of road.
I am not going to belabor this much longer.  The subject can be looked at emotionally, or realistically.  A very small amount of deaths will occur.  We create our activities to make them as safe as possible.  We develop some kind of "damage control" division to deal with press releases.
People still fly small planes, even after John Kennedy died in one.
People still ski even after Sonny Bono died.
"Auto deaths," and we all still drive.
There will always be the first reaction of the public, pushed by the media.  It will fade with the passing of a short time.  
I am old enough to remember oh so many dire predictions about the end of Endurance, (Tevis in particular) because of the Humane Society, and now PETA. We do the best we can, and there are now almost 700 endurance rides a year in this country.
Realistically, if we and other Nations want endurance in the Olympics, we can get it there in time. Positive, we have set such a good example, the sport has been growing World wide.

Lynge