đ´ What Ever Happened to Common Sense?
An equine pain face comprising low and or asymmetrical ears, an angled appearance of the eyes, a withdrawn and or tense stare, medio laterally dilated nostrils and tension of the lips..
I can totally see the value in keeping our four legged friends safe and sound and happy.
But I can also totally relate to the fact that a lot of the things causing the biggest stirs out there, all comes down to snapshots taken out of context!
Yes, you read it correctly, snapshots taken out of context!
Je suis photographer
For over a decade I spent every weekend about ten months of the year on the road to visit equestrian events, as a photographer.
This means I am not only basing my indeed very much unscientific findings on my back ground as an educated riding instructor and former trainer of both horses and riders.
But also on the many, many horses I have made photos of horses in competition.
So yes, I have seen what people of today refer to as pain face. Can I say these pain faces are common? No, I really canât.
Cause the majority of the photos showing pain faces are NOT pain faces, in most cases they are snapshots of horses caught in a certain moment.
When one shoot ten frames a second ONE photo in a series of ten can show a pain face. ONE photo in the series can also indicate the nose band is too tight.
To not create any confusion about this, YES there are horses with actual pain faces and YES there are way too many nosebands being tightened too much out there.
Still a lot, technically most, of the material coming out to the public on these topics are SNAPSHOT moments.
Snapshot moments!
A horse that takes a deep breath or is breathing hard can easily portrait a horse with a nose band sitting too tight. This happens even when itâs in fact been tightened quite loose and a grown up can fit the normal 2 fingers between the bone of the nose and the actual nose band.
A horse that is listening to his rider and flip his ears backward at the same time he is blinking, or the eye is almost anywhere in the normal blinking sequence will produce a pain face no matter if he is in pain or not.
As a horse woman AND a professional photographer slash photo editor I can honestly say I discarded these kind of photos.
I did it intentionally to never ever risk seeing my work being part of the snapshot problem created by the ones who to say the least have stopped using their brain for active thinking and are strangers to common sense.
Education, education, education!
First of all common sense needs to come back into the equation. If people drop their phones and start using their brains again common sense most likely follow.
Even more importantly equestrian sport need both professional pride and education.
A lot of the problems weâre seeing today in how the outside world sees equestrian sport would not even be a problem if only people had a proper education and did their job!
A proper education of riders and a proper education of the officials that are put in place to safe guard both animal welfare and the sport.
Cause this is where things went down the drain.
Riders and so called trainers that were never taught or forgot the two fingers rule of the nose band.
There are seriously national federations out there that hand out trainers degrees to competition riders based on their own performance in competition!
Which means that if you do good in competition on a higher level youâll also get a higher trainerâs degree! If that is not a WTF moment I donât know what is?
Being a great competition rider doesnât automatically make you trainer of the year. To train horses and people one need a certain set of skills that most certainly doesnât fly in just because one self is a competition rider.
Do your job..
Another part of the problem with modern equestrianism are the officials, the stewards and ground jurors set into play to safe guard the welfare of the horse and the sport.
When they fail to do their job because they either donât have the proper back ground nor training for their mission.
Or because they have like zero balls to officiate as they were set out to do. Then we have a problem.
Last but not least.. the media!
The fact that media, with a few exceptions already mentioned in another story, donât do their job is also not helping the sport.
Media tend to struggle with the exact same thing as the riders, trainers and officials. As in lack of motivation to do their job, and lack of education to be able to do their job properly. In some cases they seem almost blind folded to the obvious.
In other cases they âtry to show they careâ enough about wrong doings, and when doing so that is when they pay(?) an external columnist ,or blogger even, to do their dirty work. Why is that?