RE: [RC] More rules and structure - Susan E. Garlinghouse, DVM
It
always puzzles me that when one incident happens because of one person’s
poor choices or bad behavior, a large number of people feel that incident
warrants >a whole new set of rules.
I think that isolated incidences should be seen as just that.
In general, I don’t want more rules either, and for the vast
majority of us with half a brain and the minimum sense of responsibility
towards our horse, we don’t need more than one or two guidelines of how a
ride is organized.
I don’t think this Mariposa incident is nearly as isolated
as you’d think. It was just more extreme, and more visible, because
of the extent and emotions involved. New riders overriding their horse is
pretty common, though, at least here in the PSW where I vet and ride. I
can think of at least one new rider at every ride I’ve vetted/attended in
the past year (my feeble memory doesn’t go back any further than that) where
they were just plain going too fast, and weren’t allowing their horse the
support it needed (food, water, a breather) to adequately complete. If
they were meeting criteria, they thought they were fine and ignored multiple
voices of experiences telling them to slow down. Some of them squeaked by
(and would then remember their placing and ‘success’, not that they
just barely squeaked by), others needed treatment. One horse last year
was close enough to death that I had the bottle of euthanasia solution out on
the tail of my truck with two 60 ml syringes ready to go. The horse
survived with very aggressive treatment, barely, but we were up all night with
that one, too. And the rider purportedly loved her horse, kept begging me
to save her, but she wouldn’t listen to riders all day advising her to
let her horse drink, to slow down. No, she didn’t beat it or spur
it, but the horse still almost died. It was her first ride and she called
herself a ‘trainer’. Had she been riding under a more
stringent set of criteria, maybe it would still have happened, maybe it wouldn’t.
It would have been a tool for the vets to use, though.
I realize it’s another set of rules for the majority to
tolerate in order to try to rein in the minority. But I’m not sure
the ‘minority’ is as small as you might think it is.
