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Apr. 18th, 2025 05:36 pmI am so tired of the 'joke' along the lines of 'horses just die if you so much as look at them wrong'. This really bugs me even if most people don't mean it seriously (though I think too many people don't even seem to see it as a joke, they actually seem to just believe it's true), because we make most of this stuff happen, most of this isn't how horses just are, it's human beings forcing them into unnatural situations, or humans lacking in common sense or in some cases just not actually caring that causes many of these animals' deaths or injuries. Sure the fact that for example horses can't vomit is basically 'bad design' but even that's no more ridiculous than some of the design flaws of the human body (like how easy it is for us to seal off our own windpipes with food and choke to death, or that in many people it's their own immune system that's harming them).
But horses are prey animals and they also can't see directly in front of them so of course they spook at things that seem ridiculous to us but we basically expect them so often just because they're domesticated to be fine and not spooky and to magically just understand always that cars or planes or fireworks or whatever are probably not going to actually kill them or that that's just a piece of paper or a crisp packet or the wind rattling the roof or whatever not an Evil Monster That Is Going to Eat Them, even though they can't tell or comprehend what it is and they also can't just override their instincts that have been instilled into them over millions of years of evolution to get the hell out of there.
Also too often people just ignore that horses can sense things we can't, like they can smell things we can't for example. Like for instance they get written off as just Being A Stubborn Asshole and the rider gets told to whip them yet it turns out the horse can smell smoke from a wildfire and that's why it's refusing to move, or it can presumably smell that the wooden bridge they're trying to get it to cross is rotten and when they finally force it onto the bridge it breaks under them - I remember that one from a pony magazine and they were very very lucky the pony and the rider weren't killed or more badly injured but if they'd paid attention to the pony in the first place that wouldn't have happened. But then I wonder how many times do people act like the horse is just being unreasonable or stupid without finding out the cause. It's like a horse that charged through its paddock fence and injured itself so badly it had to be destroyed. It probably did so because some fucker was harassing it with a drone and it was terrified of it, but the only reason they ever found that out and didn't just write it off as the horse stupidly running into the fence for no reason was because part of the incident happened just on the edge of where the CCTV camera in the yard managed to catch it. But how many times has a horse died or horribly injured itself for similar reasons and it's been written off as just 'stupid horse behaviour' because in those cases there was no CCTV? I know of a mare who was turned out in a field and she also ran straight through the wooden fence there, broke the railings, ripped her chest open on them and she too had to be put down because her injuries were so bad. I don't know if that was an avoidable situation or not, whether someone else's actions frightened her or something else got her hyped up or whether the owner could have done something differently but the basic fact is, even in the best conditions, if we didn't put fences in the way of them they wouldn't be able to run into them. We create these situations, not the horses. It's not the horses' fault that we put them in small fields with fences that can hurt them if they spook and run into them, or even just if they get excited and misjudge the distance, or that we usually put metal shoes on their feet which raise their natural soles off the ground which can make them more prone to slipping or we shut them in the fields which are often slippery anyway because of humans' actions (through putting too many horses in one small field and it quickly getting churned up into mud, or us changing how the land drains, or whatever).
And we put tack on them that even if it's not directly harmful to them can injure them or kill them if it gets tangled on something or they get a leg caught up in it (and probably even more so nowadays, when there's more and more synthetic tack and when leather and other natural materials, which would generally tend to break more easily, seem to be becoming less common) and also we frequently seem to leave them in stables that are obviously unsafe with things they could easily get caught up on. I've seen too many stables with things like nails sticking out or low beams or low roofs or narrow or too low doorways that they could so easily badly hurt themselves on, or people giving them haynets that are tied far too low down or all these other totally unsafe things like the fields fenced with barbed wire or with stuff like jumps left out in them, or the gateways that are too narrow or with bolts or latches left sticking out or something else that they can horrifically injure themselves on. People should know better but so often they don't. Like someone I vaguely know posted a picture once of herself saying hi to some horses (not ones she actually knew) and they were both wearing these modern fancy rugs that were torn up and obviously being damaged by the horses rubbing against the barbed wire fencing you could see in the picture with them, yet whoever owned those horses apparently didn't see any problem with the fact their horses are clearly repeatedly getting their rugs caught on it and it might only be a matter of time before one or both the horses got badly hurt doing that.
And we feed them and keep them often in a completely unnatural way, generally expecting them to eat larger meals far less often instead of allowing them to be basically constantly eating grasses as their digestive systems are designed to do, and we often stuff them full of rich foods and supplements instead of mostly roughage (which not only is an unnatural way of eating for them but can also even sometimes 'hot them up' and make them more prone to 'silly' or spooky behaviour). Or we keep them shut up in stables so they're not moving around and digesting food as they move more like wild horses would. We also subject them to stresses, and then after we do all this we act like it's somehow their fault or 'just how horses are' when they end up with ulcers or colic or exhibiting really self-destructive behaviours.
We also screwed up so many of them now basically just for the sake of money, so yeah we have taller and faster horses but they have spindly long legs that will snap far more easily. They didn't just evolve that way, we forced most of that to happen.
And this isn't even getting into the horse sports and the things we expect horses to do in some of those where too often they're pushed to extremes and then people still act like it's totally bizarre and unexpected or just more proof of how 'horses are just like that' when some of them drop dead from the strain or break their legs or their necks. Or the ignoring how often horses are being 'assholes' or 'a bitch' or 'flighty' or 'spooky' or whatever because either they don't understand the rider or handler or actually they're in pain and they can't communicate that in any other way.
I'm sorry I just can't find this sort of thing funny, even this just sort of jokey blaming horses and saying they're badly designed and all have a death wish, when most of this is the result of humans' actions and also when I know of or have heard of too many horror stories of horses being either killed outright or fatally injured and having to be destroyed or being not fatally but still horribly injured in incidents that would have been completely avoided if humans had been more sensible or more compassionate. And I just hate this blaming animals or making out animals are unreasonable thing especially when the majority of the time why animals do a thing has a perfectly reasonable explanation, we just might not understand the reason why. It's like the people who got angry with their dog for continually 'barking at nothing' in the night and yelled at him to shut up, only to find out the next morning he had actually been barking at burglars breaking into a shed to steal bikes and stuff.
There's this tumblr post with the ~funny anecdote~ about how 'the horse hanged itself' which is just... that's horrible and it's just false. The horse didn't deliberately hang itself, it was left tacked up and unsupervised in a stable and when it got the tack caught up somehow understandably it panicked and fatally injured itself. That is completely the fault of humans. Yet tens of thousands of people are going on about horses being stupid ridiculous animals and how they kill themselves over the slightest thing and all shit like that. It pisses me off.
