I just read the posts on the "opinion poll" and to
please vote or post your opinion. Let me say this, about that.
I live in Seminole, Florida which is in the St.
Pete/Clearwater/Largo area. 8 miles from my house is Pinellas Park which is
where I grew up with horses. While I was president of our small horseman's
association we "guestimated" roughly 800 horses in both Pinellas Park and
Seminole. We are the most densely populated county in central Florida both in
people and horses.
In our area, many years ago there were plenty of
places to ride. Now, our association has to lease property from the county to
ride on. Not a bad deal, but we shouldn't have to lease it. Our county passed a
"Pennies for Pinellas" fundraiser for recreational trails about 10 years ago and
very few horse people showed up at any of the meetings. I didn't have horses
then or else I would have been there as well. Anyway, we got about 40 miles
of trails, but horses are not allowed. All of the planning meetings that our
county has never includes equestrians therefore, we don't exist. While I was
president of our local club, I begged people to get involved for the sake of
riding trails or else our horse property would disappear and so would any trails
we had left. They didn't. We now have probably half the horses we did then with
another major barn closing soon.
Our county loves the taxes we pay for our little
1/4-1/2 acre farms and all the other money we spend for our horses. But they
will never acknowledge that we are a horse community, entitled to some
recreational trails, because they don't have to.
So even if it is just a "count me in" it is better
than being invisible. We don't have the huge forests in our county and progress
was bound to happen, but if more horse people had said, "me too, ME TOO!", we
could have kept more green space to ride on and barns to board at.
Lord knows horse people have strong opinions, and
trying to keep open spaces available for recreation is not the time to keep them
to yourselves!
