tiger_moran | Entries tagged with horses

I 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.

I've been watching Follyfoot recently which for something from the 1970s is actually progressive in many ways and it was definitely not just 'pretty girl and cute ponies and het romance' shit. I mean like they had to shoot 2 horses due to mistreatment of them even just within the first episode, they did not fuck around, and they also addressed things like prejudice against travellers and suchlike as well as animal cruelty. (Also the het romance thing... never actually happened. They specifically had them not get together).

I liked the first two series even though it was dark at times. The third series was weird though. Oddly it reminded me in places of some of the late Granada Holmes episodes (though I think there's some crossover between the people who worked on both? So that might not be as strange as it seems), I mean that show did go rather bizarre in the later episodes too where you had Holmes moping about and behaving strangely and being all ~spiritual~ and shit. It was odd. And so was a lot of Follyfoot in the third series. Like Dora having a nightmare where she saw things that were happening elsewhere/were going to happen. So apparently she's suddenly getting prophetic visions now. And her suddenly deciding she wanted to leave Follyfoot. And the whole antagonism between her and Steve, I don't get it, he kept having a go at her about things that he did himself, he kept flying off the handle with her for being different to him yet kept saying basically he liked that she was like that, also he's the one who's been in prison but suddenly he seems to have incredible faith in the police? Also he kept calling her 'girl' throughout series 3, I'm sure far more than he did previously, and I hated that. I didn't really like him at all in series 3.

Also the episode with the guy who treated his family like crap and nobody liked except his horse and then he turned the horse loose and set fire to the stable and then dropped dead and then on top of that it had Dora angsting over his death being her fault somehow (it wasn't) I found particularly unpleasant. The way overall it all worked out with Steve trying to take over and Dora obsessing over hating how everything was changing and then it just ended was just really strange and perhaps they may have intended to resolve things more satisfactorily had they made the film (which never actually got made) but as far as I can tell there wasn't intended to be another series of it. That does kind of seem to have been all they intended to do. Which sucks. Series 2 would have been a much better place to end it if that was all they ever intended to do - it had Dora being given Follyfoot; it had the thing with the tree sprouting, it had hope. Series 3 just felt like a huge downer throughout that didn't resolve anything or have any real hope, just a vague idea that 'everything is changing and that's not all necessarily bad but I still hate that it is changing' (also the oldest horse dying and Dora just missing being with him at the end like she wanted. That was depressing too). If I watch this again I don't think I'd bother with series 3, I didn't like it much.

Side-note: Ron (who despite everything is a far more likeable character in the show than in the books and I did like how much he seemed to care about Dora) reminds me a hell of a lot of a very young Jared Harris so that's odd too.

I watched the first episode of Follyfoot last night and they didn't really fuck around in the 1970s did they, two horses had to be shot just in that first episode.

Heh, I finally found 2 negative reviews for Caroline Akrill's Courses for Horses pointing out many of the same issues that I had with it (like the email address bullshit for one), amongst a sea of gushing 5 star reviews of it. I hated it and was genuinely really upset about how much I hated it, because this is a series which left off somewhere in the 1990s both in the books and reality. This was a series I first read and loved as a child so I mean... to have the author finally bring out a final book in the series after all this time but then it really felt like she'd forgotten about anything and everything that made the series charming originally, it was really heartbreaking. She didn't seem to know when the hell it was meant to be set so it does not feel remotely like the 1990s when it should be set, it feels totally modern and you get shit like references to email addresses. Plus the humour was gone and the likeable eccentricity of the original series was mostly lacking and when it was there it felt... overdone and stupid now. Not to mention her bringing in a boring unlikeable character who had barely appeared in the series before and having him totally take over everything basically, what they do with their stables, what happens to Elaine's horse, being paired off with one of the women, while almost completely writing out an actually interesting male character. Then there's the tedious pairing off of all the female characters, the silly cowboy character who added absolutely nothing except to inexplicably namedrop Monty Roberts and get paired off with the other female character, the stupid posh massive equestrian centre that is so way way out of character for these characters, or that we're supposed to buy that Elaine sells her supposedly beloved horse who she's terrified of getting hurt or killed to someone who treats him like a commodity, then that she doesn't bother to ask who is actually buying him or who he's going to, doesn't bother to find out where he's going to live, or anything, or the also really silly thing with the ponies and them being given all these thousands of pounds worth of stuff (again! They'd already had the other horses and stuff just left with them) or the stupid Badminton plotline where the new rider magically wins of course despite only just having taken the horse on and just been in a car crash (I fucking cried at this scene I swear because it's just like... why am I supposed to care about this when you've just ripped all this away from Elaine and acted like she and we the readers are supposed to be fine with that? I was so so upset by this because it basically just shit on something from my childhood I loved a lot and just spoilt the entire series, I wish she'd never written another one honestly). Then there's the depressing ending where it's acknowledged that everything has changed which sorry didn't magically become not depressing just because she finally brought the far more interesting male character in for about three sentences and Elaine's (except he's not hers any more though) horse is about to come back but of course only as a livery and she'll now never have any say in what happens to him.

There is literally like... one minor detail in it I liked (that the black horse is finally given a name). Everything else was just... awful, and went totally against everything that had gone before in that series and everything that made it endearing to me despite it largely featuring two things I hate (hunting and eventing). But so many of the comments about it are genuinely just gushing over how amazing it is and how well it finished off the series and I'm thinking what the fuck story are you reading that you think it's so amazing and well written and satisfactory?

Me: I need to try to go to sleep earlier
Also me at 1 a.m.: watching youtube videos about diesel shunters

(Mostly brutally ugly things but I'm fond of them in a weird way)

I also just found a video featuring the last of the shunting horses. Obviously they were very lovely but the thought of horses working so close to moving trains is still kind of horrifying. I don't know why shunting horses are so little known about though, I remember seeing a couple of articles about them in old horse books but compared to things like cab horses and barge horses and pit ponies, the railway shunting horses seem to be barely talked or known about yet the last shunting horses only retired in the 1960s.