Historically, endurance was referred to as a "renegade sport", which I
always thought was descriptive but not accurate. To me, most of the equine
ACTIVITIES out there do not constitute a sport, as was brought home to me just a
handful of years ago when there was some idiotic movement in the show
...persuasions...to have HALTER reclassified as a performance class! Yes,
indeed! So now if we separate disciplines that can actually be classified as a
sport from those that are almost solely ornamental, we are left with POSSIBLY
dressage, certainly hunter/jumpers, track racing, CTR, Mountaineering perhaps,
and endurance.
A a "renegade sport", then, my heart felt desire is that it be left as
such, which means that organizations such as FEI go play in their own sandbox,
one supporting the other in theory and focus, but in the end, they need their
own sandbox! Having haled from the show ring, and still having connections, it
frustrated me to no end to see what was AHRA hijacked for their own purposes by
the ASH - a new half Arabian registry - not a purebred anything of course, but
it changed permanently the way not only AHA did business, but also the way
Arabians were bred and assumed to be!
The current pressure from FEI supporters for AERC to come into the fold as
it were, reminds me of that scenario, and it would be to the detriment of AERC
and its rank and file (who BTW is what it is about) to conform to a structure or
form that exists to support another group's desires.
In the end, while I have no objection to the existence of CTR - and many
love it as I love endurance and hunters and MSAR - it would be equally as wrong
for NATRC to hijack AERC to suit their needs and reduce the hard work needed to
build an org of their own...theoretically.
So...my current concern if you want to call it that is the future of AERC
as an organization that serves, supports and organizes events for the families,
kids, moms, dad, brothers, sisters - the whole of those who have relied on it
for decades to keep the door open to this "renegade" sport:). I think I would
have more respect for FEI as a whole if it simply tended to its own instead of
trying to change AERC to support it. And yes, we have participated in FEI events
over the years, well before FEI was...FEI! S
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