A few weeks ago, a friend of mine took his young, promising FEI horse to a big indoor show—their first after a season of success in outdoor competition. The Grand Prix went well. But in the freestyle, his poor horse was overwhelmed by the environment and utterly lost the plot. My friend had to pilot a bomb around, so the score was a bit grim. A Facebook page I follow had posted about it, and with my heart in my throat, I clicked on the comments section.
To my both shock and delight, it wasn’t the train wreck I was expecting—far from it:
“What a great job he did, handling that unfortunate situation!”
“Bad luck but handled beautifully, and the horse will be better for it next time.”
“Special horse! Just needs time and experience.”
I was floored, because the timbre of conversation on the internet about animal welfare is not usually so compassionate toward the rider. There’s no doubt that all of us—in dressage, in horse sport writ large—have some reckoning to do, but there’s a loud and committed population online that seizes upon every opportunity to tell us that high performance sport is torture, that we’re all out there drugging and wailing upon our poor animals to make them move like the circus, and that true training should be done with nothing more than love and moonbeams, if done at all.
Read the rest at The Chronicle of the Horse!