Endurance.Net Ridecamp Archives

First of all - the warning was issued and it was ignored. The warning 
was not ambiguous. It's very difficult to have a sentence that short 
with an adjective, subject and verb be ambiguous - especially if the 
subject and verb are very specific.

Lets take an analogy. In FL a few weeks ago the Highway Patrol put out 
caution signs on I4 announcing dense fog and smoke and to proceed with 
care. There was a massive pile up. I heard one person interviewed on the 
local news state that "well they didn't think they meant it was that 
bad." There is the problem - they didn't think. Most likely if the 
warnings had been heeded by all vehicles they could have all made it 
through the 4 mile stretch and there would not have been 70 vehicles 
piled up. The mistakes were made by the drivers not the Highway Patrol 
(who some people are actually blaming).

Horses are dangerous animals. No matter how well trained or how much we 
want to translate our level of socialization onto them they are still 
animals that evolved as a prey animal and animals that send and read 
very subtle signals through their body language. IMO the rider that 
moved in by the horse after the warning should have heeded the warning - 
if she had the incident would not have happened and we would not be 
having this discussion. Like the accident on I4 this incident was a 
chain of events that was triggered by assumptions made to what someone 
meant when in fact the meaning was quite specific and was driving too 
fast for the conditions.

The woman with the horse that bit can only do so much. She can warn the 
others verbally - which she did. She cannot force someone to not move in 
beside them. After the warning that is done at others own risk.

I don't know about Don, but at endurance rides I do not keep my horse in 
a tight area with other horses. Too many things can go wrong and I 
believe in addressing the risk and mitigating as much as possible before 
the fact rather than cleaning up the mess after an accident. Most of the 
time after I check through, I'm at my trailer or off away from the 
commotion. I also find my horse eats much better away from the commotion.

Truman

Kristen A Fisher wrote:
> No, no and NO. 
>
>   
> > IMO the warning was sufficient - it was succinct, it was to the point
> > and there was not ambiguity - the horse bites. Enough said.
> >     
>
> There are a billion different qualifiers to that statement! The poster
> stated she was NOT in the mare's space, she was simply between the mare and
> her horse. The mare had to lunge out of her own space to go after the
> poster. Like it or not, some of the space at a vet check has to be somewhat
> of a SHARED SPACE.
>
> Like I said before, being warned and then sticking your hand in an animal's
> face - which is, I may add, where the BITING MECHANISM RESIDES - is one
> thing. Being in the same general area and having the animal go after you IS
> FAR DIFFERENT. 
>
> The victim's initial post said that she thought it was not reasonable for
> this mare's owner to expect everyone else to stay out of the mare's way. In
> a setting where there can be hundreds of horses and people in a finite area
> - this is a reasonable assumption. 
>
> I am glad to know that you and Don are smart enough to rush to the back 40
> when you hear something like this - but for the rest of us mere mortals, it
> is reasonable to have interpreted the statement the same way the poster did.
>
> Kristen
>   


--

“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a 
monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also 
into you.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil


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