Healing Horse R+

😞

Imagine you were born inside a well established society.

- It was not your choice to be born there.
- You had no say about the rules, laws or culture.
- You were owned by someone in the ruling class.
- Your mother was owned by someone else.
- You were taken away from your mom when you were young.
- You never knew your father. His job was to be a s***m donor.
- The person who owned you treated you kindly, valued you, claimed to love you.
- They also controlled every aspect of your life.
- They determined what jobs you would do.
- They never let you leave by yourself (or unrestrained).
- They controlled your diet.
- They decided who you could socialize with, and for how long.
- They determined your schedule.
- They decided if/when/what medical interventions you needed.
- They had the power to transfer your ownership at any time.
- They also had the right to decide to euthanize you (and when).

After many years, someone from outside this community (where things are viewed and done very differently) shows up and asks incredulously:

"Don't you think this person should be set free to live the life they want?"

And your owner's response is:

"Are you kidding me? She wouldn't know how to survive outside our community. She is totally dependent on us. Besides, she has a great life here and is very lucky compared to many of her kind."

Meanwhile, you and this stranger both know that your dependency was created by the very people who denied you a choice in the first place.

And now your owner is using your dependency as the justification for continuing the arrangement.

Does this circular logic sound familiar?

If our only defense of a horse's captive lifestyle is that they probably couldn't survive without us anymore, that's not actually an argument that the lifestyle we're offering them is good (or ethical) for them.

It's just an acknowledgement that we've made them dependent.

What if, instead of asking whether our domestic horses could survive if we set them free, we choose to ask, "If our horses could have designed their own lives from the ground up, how many of the decisions we've made on their behalves would they actually want to keep?"

Because isn't that a much more interesting, ethical and constructive question?

🥺

The hardest part after a dissection…..

Is to reconcile the work into a meaningful way, to take what we see and not spend days crying for the horse or being angry at the injustice. To know how strong a horses body is once it’s mature and to see the break down in horses bodies before they are even mature. Words never feel enough. To be confronted with the library of the horses trauma shown throughout the body is sobering indeed. If you have attended a dissection you know the burden of this knowledge. It’s a burden of knowing and often wishing you didn’t.

It’s a lonely road but also one that has brought me together with many amazing women who share the burden. These people together forge the road ahead of what is a realistic expectation to place on a horses body. What is respecting the horses biology weighed against our human expectations. Horses are sentient beings and they try to work for us until they can’t any longer.

I started this work with the moto that “behaviour IS communication” and that has not shifted in the time I’ve been doing this work. Everything we do with a horse is either building them up or breaking them down.

The team has just completed a two day dissection of a 7 year old TBxcob who was roped as a 2.5 year old. When the owner collected him had rope burns to his legs and a wound on his near side hind fetlock that remained a scar. his legs were roped for training and I don’t think the type of roping to just pick up legs. I mean the type of roping to mentally break a horse. This is why it is so incredibly important to really know a trainers ways before sending off your precious horses. To do the kind of damage to a horse this size and build that we saw is violent roping in my opinion. Watch a trainer work with horses, gather intel from previous clients so you are confident in your decisions.

This horse was lucky that he ended up with a trainer who said, his body is too broken. An owner left devastated by the loss of a beautiful horse. It’s not fair and I share this story not to blame anyone because that is pointless but to show the reality of brutality to horses. If I am overtaken by the sadness I can not cope with the work so please be kind. Treating horses better starts with how we treat each other.

It’s been a big week, two horses dissected this week…accidents happen absolutely but some are avoided when we work with the horse and not against it.

Below is the accessory ligament/femoral head ligament that connects the hind limb to the pelvis. Both were damaged but the near side was the worst. The force exerted to damage this area would require immense mechanics. The near side hip socket(Acetabulum) looked like late 20s horses.

It’s midnight in New Zealand and I’m struggling to shut my brain off…..