>Come on, seven horse deaths and there are no
recommendations to fix anything with any of those incidents? We're afraid
to offend someone? If you've ever been to an endurance ride where a horse
has died (I've been to two already) you know that the whole experience is
offensive. The fun had just been sucked out of the ride and it creates a
sickening feeling deep inside your stomach when it does happen no matter what
the circumstances.
Howard, if you think the fun is sucked out of the weekend
for everyone else, you ought to be one of the ride vets. The ones I've had
to deal with (damn few, thank heavens) left me sleepless for weeks and I still
have them indelibly imprinted in my brain. But it is TRUE, Howard, that
sometimes there AREN'T any things you can second-guess and recommend to be done
differently. What can I second-guess about the horse that had been in
excellent health and doing just fine until an encapsulated tumor ruptured?
What can I second-guess about the rider who wandered off the trail a bit (still
in sight of it) and tried to cross a bog by a culvert and had the horse get
bogged down under the lip of the culvert and break a leg? (No reason for
management to have marked it as a hazard--it wasn't on the trail, per se--the
trail went down a nice forest road that went solidly across the culvert.)
Or the one where the horse dropped dead from a cerebral
aneurysm, just out from a leisurely start. Yeah, I CAN make comment
about the one I dealt with where a lady really did ride her horse to
death. And I did. Loudly. And our vetting procedures
and protocols changed as a result, and made it easier for us to stop
people like her before they can do their horses in. Try as we might, we
will NEVER make the death rate zero--we can't, because horses die as a result of
hidden things all the time. Should we do our best to understand WHY horses
die? You betcha. Should we do everything in our power to prevent
every single death that we CAN prevent? You betcha. But we have to
also know when to say that no matter how much we knew in advance, we couldn't
have prevented this one or that one. That's called reality. And no
degree of emoting is going to change that reality.
