View from Fe's yard, which may become mine after not too long.
Missed my lecture because I was too slow with the pony. It was behaviour and welfare; it wasn't that interesting last week.. Though that's terrible of me: I've missed a lecture and it's still the first week of term. I came back home though, and have applied for a job at Wetherspoons and blogged to my heart's content and, now that I've finished my lunch (making sure to eat properly because I've felt rough of late), I'm going to write up my notes for Equine Exercise Physiology before continuing with my project for Animal Welfare.
That's a weird project. We have to write about a welfare video and analyse it and all this. It's pretty interesting, the sort of thing I'm interested in, but one of the videos is about racing and it's utterly terrible. I mean, seriously. "370 horses are raced to death in the UK each year" (or words to that effect)... Ignore that there are horses that die naturally, especially thoroughbreds - just drop dead; or the horses that die in British Eventing; or horses that are abused through techniques like rollkur (below - hyperflexion of the horse's neck which is unnatural and painful) in dressage, and instead focus on the one aspect of the equestrian world which keeps it afloat, particularly in the UK. There horses are bred to run and they love it. Passionately. You can see it in any horse: put them in a field and tell them they're allowed to gallop and they will have the time of their life, nine times out of ten. Horses have their ears back because they're competitive and it's their equivalent of telling others to back off, essentially. They're not particularly distressed, not more than any runner who wants to win. Of course, they're housed in a way which could seem like it's not right because it's unnatural for the horse, but that's something that a lot of yards address (I'd know, I've worked on a few of them); and after racing, horses often have a fruitful life of being turned out, exercised casually as either stud stallions or happy hackers. Admittedly it is disgraceful that there is so much wasteage in the racing industry, but that is an entirely separate problem from horses dying in races. Horses die in races because the jockeys and they sometimes get it wrong, as anyone would know if they watched any sport. Horse riding is dangerous, as any rider or jockey knows. And because racing is done more often than any other big event, it's not surprising that it has a high death count.
Shape up.
Rollkur
Cait.X
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