Endurance.Net Ridecamp Archives

I'm starting to smell a citation rat (one article says

something and everybody keeps citing that one article

over and over again without ever questioning the

original research).

Here's an interesting publication put out by the 4H

people (1.5 meg PDF):

on the risks of various recreation activities, including

horseback riding. It's got good citations. I'll look into

it more, but the earliest "horseback riding is

more dangerous than motorcycles..." statement I can find

referred to may have been made in a 1985 article:

Firth, J. L. (1985). Equestrian injuries. In R.C. Schneider, J. C.

Kennedy, & M. L. Plant (Eds.), Sports Injuries: Mechanism,

Prevention, and Treatment. (pp. 142-157). Baltimore, MD:

Williams and Wilkins.

And of course everybody just keeps repeating it,

like this 4H publication does:

"The rate of serious injuries to riders per hour of exposure is higher for horseback

riders than for motorcyclists and automobile racers (Firth,

1985)."

Most of the hard core hits, particularly the "more dangerous

than rugby" angle, I get from a google search of

horseback "Journal of Surgery"

come from something called the New Zealand

Accident Compensation Corporation.

which seems to be a kind of New Zealand government-supported

no-fault accident insurance scheme that pays people when they

get injured. But, because the government covers you, you can't

sue for damages. The NZ Accident Compensation Corp. is pissed

off because horse injuries are so expensive to it--not

more frequent than rugby injuries, just more costly per incident.

To the authors' credit, in some interviews they sound embarrassed

at the way their research has been portrayed.

Linda Marins