Speaking Up

by Laura Crum

My last post, “Helping Beginners” sparked some interesting comments. One in particular referenced a beginner who was essentially duped into accepting an abusive person as an “expert” and spent a couple of years “enabling” this person to abuse and neglect horses—all because the beginner did not know enough to recognize abuse and neglect when she saw it. Thankfully this person eventually woke up to what was going on (partly because others kept telling her it was abusive) and sought better advisors.

So, at this point the question moves on from whether experienced horsemen should offer unsolicited advice to beginners, to the perhaps trickier one of when do we speak up and say, “Your trainer is abusive.” “Your horses are too thin; you’re neglecting them.” “Beating and jerking on this horse as you are doing is abuse.” “This sort of bitting up or rolkur (substitute your own choice) is cruel and abusive.” “Your advisor/mentor/expert is not giving you good advice.” Like many things, this sounds simple—of course we should stand up against abuse—but it really isn’t.

Let me give an example. Not too far from where I live there is a well known trainer. I took a few lessons from him many years ago and rapidly discovered he was hard on his horses and screamed at his students. I never went back. Some years later I met a woman who had worked for him as an assistant trainer. She had since taken up team roping and we met at the roping arenas. She often told me horror stories about the well known trainer, whom she had worked for for two years. Stories about how cruel he was to horses and people, including his clients and help. She referred to him as a “sadistic bastard”. But I noticed that to others, in general conversation, she was more inclined to dwell on her reflected glory as assistant to the “Big Deal Trainer”. She only told the horror stories when we were one on one.

Now the horror stories about this trainer were confirmed by a few other folks I knew who were his clients at one time. He was dishonest as well as cruel to horses and people. And based on my experiences with him, I had no trouble believing this. I also knew (because she told me) that former assistant trainer had quit on very bad terms with Big Deal Trainer and did not speak to him for a couple of years. However, at some point former assistant trainer must have decided that being on good terms with Big Deal Trainer was in her best interests and she mended the breach. And none of this meant much to me.

But not too long ago I was at a gathering where former assistant trainer waxed lyrical to some beginners who were looking for a trainer about Big Deal Trainer. How she used to ride for him, how talented he was. She advised the beginners to maybe attend a clinic or two and then put their horses in training with Big Deal Trainer. I listened to this and kept my mouth shut. No one asked me for my opinion and I did not give it.

But now I wonder. When do we speak up? Should I have said that Big Deal Trainer was known for being hard on horses and people and that former assistant trainer knew this very well. Should I have asked former assistant trainer to explain WHY she was now praising Big Deal Trainer after all the negative things she had told me about him in private—things that I was pretty clear were true, based on my own experiences and what others had told me. Should I have warned the beginners off of Big Name Trainer, despite the fact that they did not know me nor were they asking my advice, but were interested in former assistant trainer, whose opinion they obviously valued.

To me, this is a very gray area. Is it really right for me to run down this trainer to others? Is it any of my business? Under these circumstances, would it do any good, or would I simply appear as a nasty, bad mouthing person—essentially doing harm? Is it appropriate for me to call former assistant trainer on her rather two-faced approach? And/or is it wrong of me to sit silent while the beginners are led down the primrose path toward a trainer that I believe will do them and their horses harm?

This is just one example of the many gray areas we face when we talk about speaking up in the face of abuse. I chose it as an example because it is a particularly confusing area in my eyes. Some things seem pretty plain and maybe we can see that we need to speak. But some things are more complicated, like the above case. What would you do? And do you have other examples of times when it is not clear whether one should speak up or not?

Doing the Right Thing

by Laura Crum

My friend Wally came back from the local team roping a few days ago and told me a story. I’d like to pass it on here. This story really got me thinking. What is the right thing to do in this sort of situation? And this sort of situation is oh so common, as I’m sure you’ll all agree.

So, here’s the story. Apparently a team roper we’ll call Bob had a horse at the roping that Wally had seen before. Wally described the horse as a pretty nice buckskin heel horse who had taken to crowhopping when Bob kicked him up over the steer. Bob is an old guy who’s been team roping for years, but he isn’t a terribly competent roper, nor is he much of a horseman (there are a lot of ropers like this). Bob was getting lots of advice about what he should do, but he wasn’t getting his horse over this problem. And he was starting to get scared of the horse. At the roping the other day Bob asked a tough younger roper named Matt to get on the horse. Matt roped on the horse all day and punished him for trying to crowhop. Wally watched this and said that it was clear in his mind that the horse was behaving like this because he hurt. Even with a very competent rider on his back, the horse persisted with the behavior. Wally said he could tell by the horse’s expression and body language that something was hurting him. Wally told this to both Matt and Bob, who both brushed this unasked for advice off. So, Wally said to me, “What the heck do you do?”

It’s a very good question. If you insistently push your point of view at the horse’s owner, and recommend possible treatment options, you’ll likely just make yourself obnoxious and lose credibility, if the owner’s mind is set against your idea. You can’t force an owner to do something with his horse that he doesn’t want to do. And none of us can afford to buy every horse we see that’s in need of an “intervention”. Wally walked away, as most of us would do, shaking his head, and came back and asked me that question.

Since I’ve been working on this theme concerning the many gray areas we come across when trying to do right by horses, I pondered on this particular question awhile. I didn’t come up with any answers, just some stories that illustrate my thoughts. I’m going to share them with you today and ask for your advice. What do you do when you see someone doing something “wrong” to a horse? Do you interfere? And if so, how? How do you you “do good” is this sort of situation?

The potential “do gooding” can be grossly overdone and end up doing harm. For example, not so very long ago, at the pasture where I keep my retired/rescued horses, we had “Lisa”. Lisa was a neighbor of the pasture owner. She had taken on a rescue horse and gotten the pasture owner’s permission to put this mare in with our small herd. So, OK, we all did our best to get along with Lisa and the mare. But there was no “getting along” with Lisa. She was a perpetual wreck waiting to happen. Her mare seemed to have at least one soundness emergency, if not life threatening or property damaging emergency, a month, and Lisa’s personal life (with which she bored us all regularly) was the same. Friends and boyfriends and jobs came and went, with monotonous, if dramatic, regularity. And Lisa seemed to want us to be in the same condition.

She lobbied endlessly that various of our rescues/retirees needed this that or the other expensive new-agey treatment—from homeopathy to acupuncture to herbal supplements to various forms of therapy for their lameness issues. I’m not knocking this stuff—I have used all of the above mentioned treatments to good effect in my life. But Lisa didn’t seem to understand that our retired herd was comfortable enough as pasture horses, none of them were sound or young enough to be used, and that we realistically could not afford an endless stream of expensive treatments. Unfortunately Lisa was one of these people who don’t get boundries and she was intrusive in a number of ways. Eventually the pasture owner got tired of Lisa and her persistant interference and threw her and her mare off the property. Since Lisa could not really afford board for the horse and didn’t know what to do with the mare, this was a very unhappy state of affairs. And all Lisa ever had to do was relax and let her horse be happy in that field and all would have been well. It was the relentless do gooding that did harm.

I think we all know this sort of person. The one who comes up to you and says your horse needs a chiropractor cause he’s obviously hurting in his shoulder and they know just the one. Never mind that you explain that you know what’s going on with the horse. They just won’t let you alone. By the time you escape, you never want to hear the word chiropractor again, let alone look into it. Thus I don’t think the answer to Wally’s question is to hound the owner to recognize that the horse needs treatment. Once you’ve said what you see, you’ve gone about as far as you can go.

And yet, what about those times when something really rotten is happening? Shouldn’t you speak up?

Many years ago I was at a local team roping and a young guy showed up that none of us knew. Said guy roped awhile and then got mad at his horse for something—nothing big, just felt the horse wasn’t working well. He took the horse over in the corner of the arena and proceeded to beat up on him. Over and under and spur and jerk—relentlessly. This went on for awhile and everybody just sat there, watching him. Nobody liked it; nobody knew what to do. Call me hasty, but I couldn’t stand it.

I rode over to the guy and said, “Knock it off.”

Well, this kid was pretty mad and he shouted back at me that it was none of my business and it was his horse and he could do what he wanted to him.

I said, “Take him home and beat him up if you want to; you can’t do it here.”

I was about to get an earful from this still very angry young guy, but a couple of the other ropers, including the proprietor’s son, saw what was happening and rode over and told the kid to leave. Still in a genuine rage, this guy loaded his horse up and departed.

The proprietor thanked me, saying he “didn’t want those animal rights people getting after him.” But I wondered if I’d only made things worse. Maybe the kid would have gotten over his temper tantrum and that would have been that. Now that he’d been humiliated in front of the whole crowd, had he taken the horse home and truly crucified him? Or did he cool off on the drive back and leave the poor horse alone? I will never know. But I never forgot, either.

So, there’s my question for today. What do you do when you see someone “abusing” a horse? Have you all had experiences like this? What’s your advice?

Abusive Training Practices

by Laura Crum

Jami’s post about rollkur and Terri’s followup got me thinking. So today I’m going to do a post about abusive training practices. And I want to warn you straight up—this post is not for the faint of heart. If you’re squeamish, don’t read it. Also, this post is not about rollkur. Not only do I not know anything about rollkur, but I couldn’t even get my ancient computer to view the video clip that Jami put up. However, certainly both Terri and Horse Of Course expressed the opinion that this practice is abusive, and I believe them. It got me thinking about other abuse I’d seen and it brought up a question that I’ve raised before—I mentioned it in my comment on Jami’s post. So here’s my story.

A long time ago (more than twenty years) I worked as an assistant to a well known reined cowhorse trainer. Next door to this trainer was a western pleasure horse trainer, who just happened to be his girlfriend. She was always riding in his arena, and I got to know her horses.

Now I knew squat about western pleasure and I was never very interested in it. But I knew that the star of her barn was a coming three year old they called Wilbur. She hoped that Wilbur would have a good chance to win the western pleasure futurity, which was a big deal.

To my eye Wilbur looked more like a TB than a QH. Over sixteen hands tall and very refined, Wilbur was apparently what was in vogue in the western pleasure world at that time. He was a gentle, sweet colt and could execute the super slow collected lope and jog and all the other western pleasure stuff (which I don’t know much about). He had one little problem. As befitted his refined, sensitive looks, Wilbur was a tiny bit spooky.

It was nothing that would bother anyone in “real life”. But every so often this coming three year old would look askance at something on the rail and arc his body away from it. We’re not even talking untracking his feet. Just a tiny little half shy. But it wouldn’t do.

Apparently, to have a chance at winning this futurity, Wilbur couldn’t bobble in any way. He could not look askance at anything and bow up his neck. He had to be completely flat.

The pleasure horse trainer tried to take the spook out of Wilbur in various ways and failed. She became more and more upset by his flaw, and turned to her boyfriend, the cowhorse trainer, for advice.

The cowhorse trainer was one tough guy. It was this fella that turned me off to reined cowhorses forever, by the cruel methods he used to achieve his goals. And he came up with a plan to take the spook out of poor babyish Wilbur. They took this three year old, they jerked him down, tied his feet together, put him under a tarp, beat on him awhile, and then let him lie there for a few hours. I know they did this; I saw them do it.

Wilbur fought like crazy and skinned up his legs, the pleasure horse trainer shed tears, and they all kept saying they had to do it. I asked them why they thought they had to do it. (I was pretty pissed off—I quit the cowhorse trainer not too long afterwards after an even more abusive episode.) They all explained how important it was that Wilbur stop spooking, and that this would take the flinch out of him.

The thing is, I knew about the tarp routine. I’d been around some tough cowboys in my life. And the point of the whole thing is to make a horse feel helpless. I didn’t see how feeling helpless was gonna stop Wilbur from spooking. And guess what? It didn’t.

It took long weeks for Wilbur’s torn up legs to heal. He still spooked at stuff. And he had a very sad look in his eyes. That’s all I really know, because I quit that bastard cowhorse trainer and never went back. The one thing I learned best is that winning isn’t worth torturing horses. I don’t know whether Wilbur did well at the pleasure futurity. I do know that what they did to him was cruel and horribly unecessary. Simple, huh?

OK, now here’s another true story. Some not too knowledgable folks around here raised a colt they thought, in their ignorant way, should be a stallion. He was reasonably well bred, reasonably good looking, reasonably athletic. Trouble was, they didn’t know anything about stallions. They didn’t know much of anything about horses, actually. They raised up their colt and they tried to break and train him themselves and it was a disaster. These people were not mean to their young stallion, whose name was Playboy. Oh no, they were very, very nice to him—always.

Playboy was tough minded and he quickly learned to bully his owners. He got mean. They were afraid of him. They sent him to a not very handy trainer, who rapidly became afraid of him, too. Then to another trainer, who told them they had to geld him. They did. Playboy was four years old by now and the gelding didn’t change him much. He was mean as a snake. I’m talking not just a horse you couldn’t ride, you couldn’t even lead him around without him striking at you or trying to bite you—and I don’t mean nip.

His owners were scared of him. Two more trainers gave up on him. And the owners, having ruined what might have been a good horse, sent him to the local livestock auction, to take his chances with the kill buyers, or perhaps wind up with some innocent buyer that Playboy would probably put on the wrong side of the lawn. However, as luck would have it, there was a tough old cowboy there who knew Playboy’s story (it’s a small world and the trainers had talked). This guy bought the horse at killer price and took him home. And guess what?

The very next day, this cowboy led Playboy into the arena and when the horse struck at him, he jerked Playboy down, tied up all four legs, put him under a tarp, beat on him awhile and left him there for twelve hours (and no, this one I didn’t see, the cowboy told me about it). Every so often the cowboy would check on the horse and when he did, he made sure to look that horse in the eye and put his hand on his neck. And then he left him there under the tarp.

At the end of the day, the cowboy put Playboy away. And lo and behold Playboy did not bite or strike the man. He kept his distance and his eye was wary and respectful. The next day the cowboy went to work training this horse to be a useful ranch horse and rope horse. And Playboy made a good one. The cowboy kept him and rode him for many years and he always said Playboy was the best horse he ever owned. He was very fond of telling how he acquired the horse, which was how I heard the story.

So, now, here ya go. Was the tarp a cruel and abusive thing to do this time around? I’m not defending it. I’m just telling the story. Remember, Playboy did not get the way he was because people were mean to him. He got that way because people were too nice to him. He had absolutely no respect. Feeling helpless clearly addressed that issue in some very fundamental way for this horse.

This is my question. The training method was the same both times. It’s a method that most of us would call abusive. I’ve never used it. I’ve never retrained a horse like Playboy either. Was this method appropriate in this instance? I don’t know.

Here’s what I see as the main points. In the first case the method was used not to address a “real” problem—Wilbur wasn’t really doing anything wrong. It was used because someone wanted to win a particular event. Winning was the motivation. In the second case it was used as a last ditch effort to salvage a very dangerous horse from the killers. A completely different motivation.

Second point: Wilbur was a very sweet, sensitive horse and did not need such cruel treatment. And, in fact, the treatment did not help achieve the goal. Playboy was about as mean (and dangerous) as a horse can get and desperately needed to learn who was boss. They were very different individuals.

I think it comes down to two things. The individual situation and the motivation. If you are truly trying to help a horse to have a good life, and the horse is a certain sort of individual, some pretty tough methods may have to be used. If you simply want to win, and are willing to torture sweet, giving horses to that end, its an entirely different thing.

Another factor that comes into play is the skill level of the trainer. It takes an experienced, intuitive horseman to know when an extreme method is really called for, and when it will actually help a horse. Tying up all four legs, for instance, has to be done right, or a horse will just hurt himself. The trainer has to have both a complete knowledge of the method and what it can achieve, as well as truly understanding when it might benefit a given horse.

This is a very extreme example, and I’m not gonna defend it as a method. I just think it presents the point I am trying to make. And, for instance, I’ve seen certain “bitting up” exercises that can be very abusive if used to excess, also used to good effect on certain horses when the trainer employed the methods judiciously to solve specific problems and did not overdo things. The methods themselves aren’t right or wrong. It’s the way they’re used—or abused.

OK, there’s my thoughts. Please chime in with your own. It’s a complicated subject. Where do we draw the line? Could Playboy have been “rehabbed” in kinder ways? I don’t know. Is it a good thing that tough old cowboy got through to that very dangerous horse? I think so. What do you think?

Winning

by Laura Crum


Last week I did a post on the reasons I gave up showing horses and looking back on it I find it very incomplete. I mentioned the political aspect of it as a judged event and the cost. These things did have a lot to do with why I quit, but there were other reasons, too.

Kate mentioned seeing too many “servicably sound” horses in her hunter/jumper world, and I had to agree. Competition of all sorts in the horse world seems to result in so many horses pushed to keep working despite being sore, and then thrown away like used sporting equipment when they just can’t go any more. I think all of us have seen this and been affected by it. Some of us quit competing because we don’t want to be around it any more or support it in any way. However, I didn’t get to that place until I quit competing at team roping, the last competitive event I practiced.

Today I want to revisit cutting, particularly the last cutting where I competed. This would be our local county fair, twenty years ago this past fall. My horse, Gunner, was nine, and I had been competing on him at cuttings since he was four. I'd gotten a little jaded on the political element and the whole horse trainer shtick (see my post “Once Upon A Time”), and was starting to go team roping and liking it. But I decided to show Gunner one more time at the fair. I didn’t know it would be my last show, but I wondered.

In order to get ready for the cutting I practiced a bit and then hauled my horse over to a friend of mine, who was a local trainer.

“I want you to watch me cut a cow and tell me what you see,” I said. “I want to know what I should work on.”

So I walked Gunner into the herd and cut a cow. The cow tried him hard and Gunner worked well. Clean and crisp, not too long or too short, he was spot on; I never had to touch his face; he held that tough cow right in the middle and never missed a beat. I was very proud of him. When the cow turned away I touched Gunner’s withers to let him know we were done and walked back out of the herd and said to Bob, “Well?”

“He did fine,” he said.

Now even for trainer speak that was pretty laconic. I’m not particularly patient with trainer speak, anyway.“What do you mean he did fine? Is he as good as the horses that win?”

Bob shrugged.

“How is he different? What are they doing he isn’t doing?"

Bob shrugged again. “They’re a little fancier. He’s not doing anything wrong. They’re just flashier.”

Well, OK then. I knew what he meant. I was down to the root problem. There were two reasons that Gunner was not as fancy as the horses that won a lot. One was that he was big for a cutter. Gunner was 15.3, with good solid bone. He probably weighed 1200. Most successful cutting horses are smaller and lighter, which makes it easier for them to be quick and catty. I still remembered the initial reaction of the first cutting trainer I worked for when I unloaded Gunner from my trailer. This guy took one look at the horse, shrugged, and said, “Sell him and get another one.”

“What do you mean?” I said. “You haven’t even seen him work. He’s a nice horse.”

“I don’t care,” he said. “You want one that’s little and cute and catty. He’s too big. He looks like a rope horse.”

However, Gunner really was a good horse. He was quick and cowy and moved well and he had a lot of intensity and snap. He made a pretty darn good cutter. And now we came to problem number two, and it was the real stopper.

I had trained Gunner to be an effective cutter. What I had not done was train him to be flashy. So, what did this mean?

In the cutting horse world at that time, the horses that won regularly did a lot of “extra stuff”. If a cow moved slowly to the left and then paused, these horses did not mirror the cow, moving to the left and pausing, as I had taught Gunner to do. Nope. These horses did a whole lot more. They jumped to the left, to the right, back to the middle, pattered their front feet and back to the left, even if the cow was just hesitating there, doing nothing much. It was very flashy.
So what’s wrong with that, you ask. That’s what’s cool about cutting horses, all those fancy moves. Well, yeah. And again, not so much. Because these horses weren’t dancing around because they wanted to, nor was there much point in it. They were dancing like this because they had been spurred good and hard, over and over again, and they knew better than to simply mirror the cow and do what a cutting horse is supposed to do. No, they needed to move and dance constantly, and be “over the top” in every way, or they’d be punished.

Don’t get me wrong. Good cowhorses do some of this “dancing” on their own, because they love to work cows. Gunner did it, to some degree. It is part of what’s cool about cutters and all cowhorses. But these winning horses did it every time a cow slowed down enough to let them, and I knew very few (well, I personally didn’t know any) who were not taught to do this with an awful lot of spur.

I’m not saying I didn’t spur Gunner to teach him to be a cutter. I did. I don’t know anyone who trains cutting horses and never uses spurs. But I wasn’t willing to spur him over and over again when, by my lights, he was doing his job correctly, holding his cow, moving crisply, mirroring the cow’s every move, and working exactly as I had taught him to work. I wasn’t willing to torture him to make him fancier.

I also wasn’t willing to sell him and get one who was more the right “type”. At that time, I could have sold Gunner for a lot of money (by my standards, anyway). Even though he wasn’t ultra fancy, he was a solid, reliable cutting horse who was completely gentle and sound and he would pack anyone. Many trainers looked at him and thought they could “tune him up” and he’d be perfect for their beginning non-pro. I was offered ten thousand for him several times, which was a good price for an entry level cutting horse (at that time).

But I didn’t want to sell Gunner. I’d trained him myself, and I was proud of him. More than that, I loved him. I wasn’t going to dump him and get something I could win more on. And that was that.

As for the option of letting an accomplished trainer keep Gunner in training and make him flashier, well, I knew just what that would entail. I’d been around long enough to be sure that I didn’t want anyone else beating up my good horse. So many “horse stories” look very pretty when you see the horse placing at the big show with rider and trainer grinning at each other. Its only when you know the true underpinnings of such a story, all the abuse dealt out to horses and all the hatefulness between people, that you realize that the fairytale façade that’s presented is a very long way from reality. Unfortunately abusive treatment of horses, and trainers who start out charming and humble only to reveal themselves as passive aggressive sociopaths only interested in protecting their fragile egos—this is pretty much a routine tale in the professional horse business. Such trainers are often talented at training and winning—its compassion towards horses and forgiveness towards people that’s lacking. I’d learned enough by now to want nothing to do with all that. Also, for me, part of the point was that I wanted to be the one riding, training, and showing my horse. I didn’t own a horse for someone else to be riding him. Let alone that I couldn’t afford to keep Gunner in training, I had no interest in that idea.

I left Bob’s place feeling that I’d made a pretty nice horse and if I couldn’t succeed under the system, well, I’d leave that system behind.

So, I showed Gunner at the fair, feeling it would be my last show. It wasn’t a big class, maybe fifteen horses. I drew up fourth. Watching the first three go, I saw right away that the whole pen of cattle seemed to be runners. Nobody was able to cut some nice little pup that set up in the center and allowed their horse to “play”. Nope. Every cow wanted to run hard, driving across the pen in a strong attempt to get back to the herd.

This is actually the most challenging type of cow for a horse to hold, and, unfortunately, a horse doesn’t usually get marked for doing a good job of it. Judges wanted to see a cow set up in the middle and a horse get “fancy”. Running cattle were a big negative.

However, Gunner was quite good with tough cattle. He could run and stop and he stayed honest. When my turn came, I cut some cattle that ran (I couldn’t find a pup either) and Gunner held them really well. I didn’t make any mistakes. It was a solid go, but not very flashy. As I rode out, Bob, who was turning back for me, said, “Your horse ran across the pen real well.”

I knew just what he meant. We’d done a workmanlike job, but it wasn’t by any means a spectacular run. The judge marked me a 71, which was a fair mark for what I’d done.

I led Gunner away from the ring, feeling proud of him for a job well done, and mildly disgusted with the whole deal. Cuttings are, in case you don’t know, a long drawn out business, with lots of warm up and time spent settling the herd, and all of it, except one’s own run, and the occasional moments when one’s competition is doing something cool, is about like watching paint dry. I was pretty jaded by this time, as I said in my last post. I didn’t even watch the rest of the class.
I unsaddled Gunner and brushed him, completely sure that some of my fancy competition would outscore me. I hadn’t marked very high. I couldn’t hear the loudspeaker from where I was, so I had no idea how things were going.

It was only when a friend came dashing up to my trailer saying, “They’re looking for you,” that I found out.

I’d won the class. Apparently the fancy horses hadn’t been able to cut any easy cattle either, and everybody had either lost a cow and/or gotten out of shape. My 71 was the highest score.

Back I went, leading Gunner, to get my silver buckle and have my photo taken. It wasn’t the biggest show I ever won, or the highest score I ever marked, or my best run. Not even close. It was, however, my last show, and our local county fair, and for some reason it remains one of my favorite memories. I still have the buckle and the photo, which remind me of that happy moment. In an odd way, the fact that I won that last cutting seemed to validate all the time and money I’d spent on training Gunner to be a cutting horse.

I never regretted giving up cutting. I trained Gunner to be a team roping head horse and roped on him until he was fourteen. At fifteen I retired him to the pasture, and he is living a happy turned out life, sound, if peggy, at thirty years old this spring. He is still my horse, and I still love him and take care of him.

As for me, I competed at team roping for almost ten years, first on Gunner, and then on Flanigan, until the point where I realized I simply did not care about winning. I enjoyed roping, but I had gotten completely to the end of my tolerance for seeing horses crippled and people be unkind to each other, all in the interests of winning. Don’t get me wrong, lots of people were good to their horses and nice to each other, but plenty were not. At the end of my team roping career I would get to a roping and find myself fervently praying, “Don’t let any horses or people or cattle get hurt (yes, I cared about the cattle—so laugh at me), and let whoever needs to win, win.” It didn’t take too long after that for me to be sure I never wanted to see another horse get hurt again in pursuit of the almighty win. I never wanted to watch some poor mostly lame critter struggle on or see someone beat up a horse who had somehow failed to please the rider (though often the fault lay with the rider rather than the horse). All because people wanted to win. I didn’t even want to be around it.

For those of you who read this blog and who like to compete in some horse discipline, I am not suggesting that you don’t treat your horses well. It is totally possible to treat your horse well and compete on him, too—I know that. You cannot change the behavior of those around you, but you can decide what you yourself will do and not do. This blog post (and my previous post “Once Upon A Time”) were suggested to me by reading some blogs where it seemed to me that winning was glorified a bit and the path by which that win was achieved was not portrayed very honestly. When horses get trashed and there is much hatefulness between people along the way, winning isn’t worth it—not in my opinion.

The other reason I wanted to address this subject is that I think it is truly worth bringing up and talking about. I competed for many years and for a lot of that time I was really enjoying myself. Training my horse, improving, testing myself…all this meant a lot to me. When I got to the place where I was ready to leave it behind, well, I had got to that place, as this blog describes. One of my best friends, a woman who is a much more competitive team roper than I ever was, recently got to the same place and gave up competition. She and I trail ride together and we have a talked a lot (as you might imagine) about this process of letting go of the need to compete and why we needed to leave that world and how it has been for us. I don’t mean to suggest that I know some single answer that is right for all horse people. I just know that my friend and I have discussed this subject a lot lately as we mosey down the trail, and it is much on my mind.

Competition, and the desire to win, is driven by several factors. Money is one of them, and I haven’t even touched on this. But people who are in the horse business to make money need to win. To prove their stallion, or their training barn...etc. The need to make mony fuels the drive to win, in many cases. And a lot of abuse springs from this root. But many of us compete in order to prove ourselves…we’re not in it to make money. We train, and try to improve, and then compete to test ourselves. And in some cases this testing and proving of oneself can become an intense ego driven need to win that results in the sort of abuse that I have described. In the discussion following my last blog post several people, including Terri and stillearning, talked about what we can do to change this. I freely admit that I have no idea, though Terri had some great suggestions. Its true that I have just opted out, and I don’t know if this is an honorable solution or not. The bottom line is that I couldn’t stand to be around it any more.

I do know that horses and people get hurt trail riding, too. But in my experience the pressure we put on ourselves and our horses in the interests of competition is far more likely to lead to injury and breakdown than a relaxed ride “outside”, where winning is not a factor. So now I trail ride in the hills and on the beach with my son and my friends. And I visit Gunner in his pasture and pet him and tell him what a good horse he is. I’m having just as much fun as I did when I was cutting and team roping, somewhat to my own surprise.

That’s what I call a happy ending.

Feel free to tell me I’m nuts and competition is a good thing. My team roping friends who are still out there trying to win tell me this all the time. Cheers--Laura