Best Condition

["Sarah Roxanne Zawacki" <zawackis@pilot.msu.edu>]

    Okay, I have a question, which may seem quite obvious, and probably is.
When I first read the "why don't we use horse's body weight percentage being
carried" thread, I totally agreed.  And then someone noted that this would
discriminate against non-Arab breeds who are larger, which may be at a
disadvantage anyway, depending on the individual. (See!  I'm learning here!)
Okay.  So then I think, what if we *did* do body percentage, for the sake of
fairness, for BC, and then maybe do something else for horses that just
*weigh* more, to make that fair also.  And then I realized, where will it
stop?  I mean, there are SO many factors involved, as several people have
noted, that, for the sake of fairness, would we start equalizing everything
out?  Would we give handicaps to riders based on experience, either in the
form of later starts or more weight?  Would we handicap horses the same way,
just to level the playing field some more?  More accurately, for the sake
of fairness, would we be inclined to handicap factors the rider or horse had
nothing to do with?  (i.e., the rider just naturally is built for great
balance, or the horse just naturally drops very fast--things that hard work
did not necessarily create.)  And then where does it stop?  In the end,
when all the horses and all the riders have been made as equal as possible,
what will the BC vets be looking for?  I mean, what is *it*, the best
condition holy grail, and how do we locate it?  It just seems to me, upon
examination, that it's too hard to separate the factors, and in some cases,
such rules might even be unfair.  This may reap flames by the dozen, but my
guess is that if it was so incredibly important to a person that they get
a BC (and a BC has very understandable value), then they can get in better
shape (reading about these 104 pound women makes me cringe and want to
start jogging at times), get another horse, take dressage lessons for
balance, etc.  They aren't *pretty* options, but they're options.
    While I initially agreed that things should be made as fair as possible,
I had a hard time figuring out what fair meant when I thought about it
some more.  Do we level the ground so that the horses are being tested, and
not the riders?  Therefore, every horse should carry essentially the same
rider.  But doesn't that discriminate against horses that personally
(horsally?) do better with a different type of rider?  Or should we level
the ground for riders, giving them the same horse?  It just sounds to messy.
It's safe to assume that people are doing what they're doing because they
want to, because they have choices that they are able to make.  And we should
allow these choices to stand, I should think, whether it was that third
cookie I just had in the cafeteria (yum!) or my decision to be in Michigan,
where I don't have the option of conditioning year-round, and then mock the
possibility by being a full-time college student on top of living in
Michigan.
    I don't know.  Maybe this is a silly point, but it's what occurred to
me when I started thinking about what we *could* do to make BC judging
more fair.





                    Sarah, the 155 pound rider who had honors intro
                    to philosophy last semester and has had her entire
                    thinking process warped beyond recognition as a
                    result and answered the problem by redefining it
                    in typical philosopher fashion, and Elliot, her
                    15.3 hand horse who weighs something like 900 pounds,
                    because of his rabbit legs and 18 inch wide chest.
--


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