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I've been watching this debate for some time with, I must admit, 
decreasing interest. But I think that it is essential that people get 
their issues sorted out and prioritised.  I live in a country without 
liability insurance for the most part. Egyptians do the most amazingly 
stupid and wondrous things, and they regularly get injured and/or 
killed doing them. I'm not sure that the word "safe" as many of you are 
using it even translates into Arabic. The general feeling is that stuff 
happens when you are silly.  Steph, Jackie, Merri and Tracy know 
exactly what I mean since they watched the workers construct my parrot 
flights in a manner guaranteed to put OSHA into a coma.  Oddly enough, 
one of the things that I love about this national looney bin is the 
fact that all of these things are still possible.

First, horseback riding of any sort is a seriously dangerous sport. If 
you engage it in, you are highly likely to get hurt no matter how 
careful you are. If you don't want to get hurt, don't do it. That's the 
only guarantee. You may still get injured or killed but it won't be by 
a horse.

Second, I have two kids who tried riding with varying results and I 
TOTALLY disagree with anyone who says that kids will do anything to 
please their parents. I would have loved to have horse-crazy kids. I 
didn't get them. My son rode for a while and quit after a serious 
accident in the desert when with the entire bloody Sahara to ride in we 
found three riders immediately in our faces as we galloped up a hill. 
His mare slipped in the sand trying to avoid a collision and fell with 
the boy. He was twelve. There were no riding helmets in Egypt at the 
time (12 years ago) and he compressed the third dorsal vertebra coming 
within a cm of being Christopher Reeve. Was it anyone's fault? No. It 
was simply the worst possible luck, but the best luck as well in that 
he recovered without any ill effects other than an aversion to 
horseback riding that I really can't fault. My daughter simply decided 
after coming off another mare later with no ill effects that she and 
horses didn't mix until recently, but she's still just a 
fool-around-the-farms rider. There is nothing at all in the world I 
could have done to get these kids riding endurance. Nothing. Endurance 
involves enduring and you only do that by choice.

Third, if you have children that CHOOSE to go through the insanity of 
riding a horse for hours and hours and hours, as a parent you have to 
decide on the safety parameters given that your children have chosen to 
do one of the most dangerous sports known. It's sort of like a kid 
deciding to take up skydiving. How (assuming that the equipment is 
available, in their size and safe) could you force a child to take that 
up? But if you agree to allow them, you have to accept that you are 
permitting a level of risk in their life. It's your kid. It's your 
responsibility. No one else's.

Finally, the real issue here is that you have a bunch of people who are 
crazy by choice and choose to ride horses in interesting (often in the 
Chinese sense of the word) places and they sometimes get hurt or even 
killed. Go back through the archives and collect the crash stories. 
There are zillions of them, some at rides and some in training and some 
just messing around or doing horse chores. These people come in all 
shapes, sizes and ages, but basically none of them should be near a 
horse if they don't have the understanding that they take their life in 
their hands each and every time they go near one. You can't legislate 
safety in an activity that is inherently unsafe.  You also can't 
legislate good sense unfortunately and some people are going to do 
stupid things.  Maybe the best you can hope for is an understanding or 
an agreement that anyone involved in endurance knows the risks and 
accepts them.


My personal preference is to be able to look at a situation, assess the 
risk factors and choose for myself. When my kids were still kids, I 
would explain the situation to them and give them MY boundaries and 
then let them choose. They lived on a sailboat most summers from the 
time they were babies...they wore lifejackets and were tethered when 
bluewater sailing. They're both good sailors as adults. They learned to 
drive in the desert before they learned on streets...at the age of 15. 
They weren't allowed to drive on streets until they had an Egyptian 
license at the age of 18, much to their disgust. Talk about 
unsafe....there's nothing like driving in Egypt.  They both have 
diver's licenses, although they don't both dive with any frequency. My 
son got his diving license at 12, once he was tall enough to carry the 
tanks. He got a French license since PADI didn't allow diving until he 
was 14.

If you want to protect AERC as an organisation from legal action, let 
lawyers do it. Have them crank out some killer legal document that 
everyone has to sign ONCE on participating in ANY AERC activity, 
whether as a vet, volunteer or rider saying that they recognise the 
dangers and agree not to sue ever for anything that ever happens at an 
AERC event. I like Kat's suggestion regarding indemnity for parents 
signing for underage kids. They shouldn't even join AERC without such 
an understanding and they definitely shouldn't be at a ride without 
understanding. We have people who mess up jeeps in the desert at our 
rides, we've even had them flip the bloody things. EERA's fault or 
FEI's fault? Who was driving anyway?  One of the idiot undertrained 
horses kicks out at a vet check? Not the organisation's fault. No one 
forced them to stand there.  And here the owner of the horse will 
voluntarily pay a medical bill if his/her horse does something 
antisocial.

Most kids under the age of about 8 really don't have the muscles, 
mentality, or determination for distance riding. Those that do are 
rather special and I can't see stopping them. Is the issue really 
whether they should do it or whether AERC should have a legal problem 
because they do? If it's the latter, then let some lawyers earn their 
living by preventing litigation, which is an honorable activity.

I think that this is really a legal issue and should be left to lawyers.

Maryanne Stroud Gabbani
miloflamingo.blogspot.com
http://www.alsorat.com


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