Well hello there Raging Roll Kür Grannies, and welcome! I must commend you for one thing: signing your vitriol with your names.  I have to say I was a bit surprised to have provoked so much hissing and spitting over the ‘top ten list’ item that I added as an afterthought because I was struggling to come up with a tenth. I AM tired of the roll kür debate, but your reaction suggests you have failed to grasp the reason for my fatigue. As I pointed out in my top ten list, my complaint is with the disproportionate nature of the debate, which you have so beautifully demonstrated in your histrionic expressions of outrage at the bottom of my last post.  The very fact that you would claim riding in a deep frame is equivalent to starving a horse highlights that those who hang onto this issue like the last piece of flotsam in the sea have lost your sense of perspective. Too close to the trees, as they say.

Here are the headlines of six out of ten of the articles identified to me today by my daily Google alerts for ‘horses’:

Bureau of Land Management Restricts Sale of Wild Horses After Investigation of Colorado Livestock Hauler (he was illegally selling the horses for slaughter)

Owner of dead, seized horses charged with cruelty

Neglected Warren County horses still need homes

Malnourished Horses Seized from Chileno Valley Ranch

Horses stabbed in Zebulon

HBO Telivision Sued for Allegedly Abusing Horses

See what I’m talking about? Riding horses around in an excessively deep frame for an excessively long time is not correct training, and I do not condone it. I don’t like draw reins either, for that matter. For those of you who read this blog before two days ago (and didn’t just find me through your daily trolling of cyberspace for the magic phrase), you know I have been unafraid to identify performances that I saw which lacked the  self-carriage that should be everyone’s ultimate goal (ie. Adelinde in London and Patrik Kittel at the GDF).  But you crusaders might want to take a little reality check and decide if you have picked a battle that will really make a difference to horses’ quality of life at the end of the day.  To say that all forms of abuse deserve the same efforts to prevent them is about as workable as communism. ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his need’ looks good on paper, but it’s an epic fail in practice.  Imagine if the medical profession treated all as-yet-incurable ailments with the same degree of research effort, so that warts would be given as many resources to find a cure as cancer. Get real, grannies.