Do you remember the furore about Mark Todd and the raised branch? I am not going to get into the nitty gritty of my opinions of the rights or wrongs of his action but we should remember the issues at stake. We are approaching Paris Olympics and the organisers have announced that this time there will be no test event- to save costs. Equestrian competition in the Olympics is expensive, as well as effective in excluding many countries from hosting or participating.
The Olympics are a huge public showcase for equestrian sports. Humans have always been fascinated by horses, by their beauty and grace and power. But in an industrialised, mechanised and now digitised world, how many people nowadays have never seen a horse in real life, let alone sat on one?
Because it isn’t my experience, or yours, that matters to the future of horse sports.
What we equestrians must remember is that horse sport, and thus to some extent, leisure horse riding, owes its continuing existence to a social contract.
The social license for horse sports presumes that the owner and the rider love the horse, that the humans ensure the best possible care for the animal, and that they provide the animal with the best possible life in return for the honour of using that animal for sport, for the gratification and glory of the human.
“Addressing the Fédération Equestre Internationale (FEI) General Assembly, Roly Owers of the World Horse Welfare recommends that the equestrian community be cognizant of how the public views the use of horses in equestrian sport. Owers recommended that equestrian sport pursue a social license, which is an unwritten, non-binding contract that means society gives horse sport the right to operate.
Owers said that this would build societal trust that horse sport can operate in a transparent and ethical manner.
Owers points out that there is a small contingent of animal rights groups that believes that using the horse for any profit or entertainment is unacceptable. Animal rights groups are transposing animal welfare issues with animal rights issues; animal welfare is about improving the treatment of animals, not banning their interactions with humans.”
how the public views the use of horses in equestrian sport
Those who are uneducated (or un-indoctrinated) to the so called subtlety of equestrian sports seem to see abuse and mistreatment of horses much more clearly than the so-called experts and fans.
Here are a couple of examplar articles from international news sources, not equestrian press.
https://www.dw.com/en/opinion-animal-cruelty-on-display-at-the-olympics/a-58790373
So this week, what the casual observer scrolling through Tik Tok saw was a bastion of the equestrian sport community, a knighted Olympian no less, chasing after a scared horse with a stick raised above shoulder height and striking that horse 10 times.
This incident made headlines in the UK national press- “Eventing great Sir Mark Todd APOLOGISES after video showed him whipping horse ‘TEN times with a branch’ to force it through water obstacle – as British Equestrian condemns video.”
Sir Mark Todd absolutely understands the importance of the social contract.
He trains racehorses now, and the British Horse-racing Authority are super hot on the importance of the social contract. They have to deal with the League Against Cruel Sports on a regular basis. The annual deaths at the Grand National as well as other depressingly common incidents at less high profile tracks are only offset by the fairy tale stories of the luxury lives the racehorses lead, treated like kings, pampered like royalty, their every need and want met by an army of staff deployed simply to keep them in tip top condition for racing. The race-going and race viewing public are generally not horse experts. They just like racing and betting. It’s a bit of fun on a weekend afternoon. The general public don’t want to see horses suffer or die.
And now, as well as TV, we have all these other social media platforms where the casual viewing public can access a few moments of entertainment. Anyone who has a phone can take a picture or shoot a quick video and share it worldwide. And every person with a phone now has an entertainment player in their pocket, or actually in their hand most of the time.
Most of the people who clicked through to play that video will have no idea who Mark Todd is, his pedigree in eventing or what he was trying to achieve in that moment. They just saw some bloke repeatedly hitting a horse with a branch.
And the public were quite rightly outraged at this image.
As riders and owners, supposedly horse lovers and participants in horse sports, we must understand that outrage!
And we should not normalise or explain away that behaviour.
Because to normalise or explain away that image suggests that beating horses in training is acceptable and commonplace. And the sentimental, animal loving public who like cute, funny animal videos quite rightly expect the Olympic champions who ride horses for sport to treat them like kings. This public will not like that idea of cruelty based training being common place and they will harden in their outrage against all horse sports.
“I don’t like the Grand National- horses die” or
“I don’t like eventing- I hate seeing the horses fall at those enormous obstacles”
or now “I don’t like watching cross country- those horses only jump those crazy jumps out of fear because they are trained by being whipped over them”
It is about public perception.
If the general public perceives that animals in sport suffer for human pleasure, the social contract is broken. And then PETA and LACS and the rest of the animal rights activists get their day in the news and before we know it will become illegal to ride horses, or race them, or jump them. I’m not sharing any links to PETA here- I won’t give them the airtime, but if you love to ride horses you should be aware of their viewpoint on riding full stop. It does us all good to question our beliefs and actions, or at least to see them through another lens.
Mark Todd has apologised.
And we must all apologise with him, for his error of judgement and the fact that he resorted to the use of force. And we should own our collective shame, and acknowledge that we all have all done things at some point in our journey which we would not like to have on film doing the rounds of Tik Tok. And the correct response to this incident is not to ban all cameras, as the FEI have done in the warm up rings at dressage competitions, but to make sure that we all, as individuals, educate ourselves, skill up and control ourselves, so that we never have that momentary lapse that could go viral.
We should all apologise and do better, every minute, every day, for the sake of our horses, for the good of our own souls and for the future of our sport.
It’s the same dream that got us all into horses
Thank you for reading.
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