Friends convinced classical dressage is abuse
I lived in Vienna for a while last year, and had a solid group of maybe 6 or so mostly American friends who I hung out with on a regular basis (I'm American as well). Somehow one of my friends convinced the rest of them that the Spanish Riding School abuses the Lipizzaners there, so if I wanted to take a tour of the school or see a show or something I had to go alone, and I avoided talking about it with them. One friend was even convinced that the whips they use are electrified (?!)
I wasn't going to argue since I was just one person against the whole group. A couple of them eventually saw shows at the Spanish Riding School with their families and were still not convinced the horses were treated well because, they said, all the movements looked so "unnatural."
I still think about this a lot and it really grinds my gears. I know it's just that they were judging something they don't understand (and I don't say that to be condescending; none of them had ever really been around horses so they didn't know a lot about them or different disciplines etc). And I definitely don't want to discount that abuse can happen anywhere, but from what I saw the horses seemed to be treated very well and the things that concerned my friends were standard classical dressage moves.
I guess this is more of a rant than anything, but has anything like this happened to you? How do you respond when someone who isn't knowledgeable about horses have opinions like this?
Submitted September 15, 2018 at 06:02PM by schoessling
via reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/Horses/comments/9g682x/friends_convinced_classical_dressage_is_abuse/?utm_source=ifttt
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