Speaking Out About Horse Abuse

Going back to what I said in my initial post, I really appreciate all horses, not just Arabian Horses. Good horses to me are an important part of life and I know they’re just as important to many other people. Horses feed the soul of those of us who love them – there is no doubt in my mind about that. With all the stress of today’s world, heaven only knows how much we need horses.

So while my blog addresses Arabian horses in particular, the message is really the same for all horses. No horse, not a shire , a paint, a quarter horse, an Arabian, a mini, or anything in between, should be used and abused, bullied and intimidated.

Horses that are being treated in such a manner are unfortunately all too common in today’s society. You would think that with so many years since Black Beauty by Anna Sewell was first published that the treatment of horses would have improved dramatically from the conditions exposed in the book. However, that is not the case, clearly there is a strong move towards natural horsemanship around the world but that evolution in the way humans respond to equines is slow in developing.

Yes, there are some horsemen out there that truly grasp an understanding of the horse and how to communicate with it and train it in such a way as to instill great confidence and trust in the horse. Some of those are very public for the equine community to see; others do their teaching one on one affecting the transformation one student at a time, one step at a time. the progression of the change can only advance as the rest of us learn. Most of us are either rank amateurs or worse yet, we’ve not even started on the journey of finding a better way to deal with our horses.

But what is important here is not that we have a long, long way to go, as much as we are moving in the right direction. Twenty years ago, the magazines had advertisements for John Lyons, Richard Shrake and Pat Parelli and a few others I’ve probably forgotten. Today, there’s a much longer list of those selling themselves as clinicians and trying to make the world a better place for the horse. Their students are teaching their students and so it goes. There are sites on the internet devoted to natural horsemanship like What Is Natural Horsemanship and Natural Horsemanship on Wikipedia For more sites Google "Natural Horsemanship" on the end of this page. There are programs on the television devoted to better ways to train your horse with Clinton Anderson and others.

I know many of us are still a long way from being able to confront that abusive rider at a trail ride or a show or the handler trying to beat a horse into a trailer, or the boarder three stalls down from us in the public boarding barn. My guess is that day will come as we become more confident in our knowledge of how to deal with horses since we, humans, tend to want to keep our mouths shut unless we’re absolutely positive that we aren’t going to make a fool out of ourselves. We'll need to be more educated before we're brave enough to fight this battle one on one.

What's important is that we're on that road... the process of us making a daily effort to make ourselves better horsemen/horsewomen will get us to a safe and happy life for all horses. See this article Horse Racing, Sport or Animal Curelty, Granted the person writing this article thinks that anyone holding a whip must be abusing a horse and needs to be educated also so there is some balance. The use a whip doesn't need to be banned but the mis-use of it sure does. But the very fact the question has been posted tells us we are heading away from the days of Black Beauty and towards the days horses are treated with the dignity and respect they deserve.

The key to all of this is education.As long as all of this information is available; there are clinicians willing to teach, horse owners, fanciers and lovers willing to learn, and blogs and other discussion like this where abuse continues to be exposed, with enlightened horse owners seeking it out, learning it and practicing what they preach, the world will daily become a better place for all horses, not just my beloved Arabian horses.