Re: Moral Dilemma

["Maggie Mieske" <mmieske@netonecom.net>]

This is an interesting issue, one that Nelson and I deal with frequently.
Being in the business that we are, we "hear" a lot of stuff.  We also see
the results, good and bad, from various other "professionals" and it's a
tough decision sometimes to decide how we deal with certain things.
Usually, as far as farriers go, Nelson comes in AFTER the fact and if he is
doing someone's horse and we hear about a "bad apple", we don't have to
worry about folks letting the bad apple near their horse again.  However,
though we have some vets we favor over others for various reasons, Nelson
often has to consult with them, so we keep our opinions to ourselves except
to say "he's great at stitching up" or "she is the one to call for a problem
diagnosis" etc. and keep negative comments to ourselves.  ANYWAY, our
biggest dilemma in this area is a lot of people who CLAIM to be
trainers...even make up nice professional looking cards for themselves.
There is one in particular who people will rave about (usually newbie horse
owners)...the man is abusive to horses.  We have OFTEN seen horses just
recently returned from training with injuries and illness and bad attitudes.
We won't go there to do his horses (he is a former client) and so he gets
someone else and we usually have to retrain horses after THAT guy...it's a
mess.  We have refrained from telling people that they are nuts...this guy
HURTS horses.  But we have recently started questioning whether we should
speak out and relate what we have actually seen and experienced...we have
seen horses before and after training and you couldn't pay me enough money
to send even a horse I hated to him!  His own nephew, who is a client of
ours, has an even lower opinion of him than we do.  I think we should be
honest with folks.  I feel that if we lose a few clients because of someone
like him, we don't really want people like that as clients.  On the other
hand, if word gets around that we are saying negative things, I am not sure
what the repercussions might be...our service area is very large and losing
even all our clients in this one area would not hurt us.  It's a touchy
subject and I am interested to hear what folks' opinion are...(sorry this is
so long!).
Maggie