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?
I had to leave them behind in Carteret County NC when we evacuated in front of Florence because I couldn't get my truck fixed ahead of the storm. They are pretty protected from wind and flooding in their location but I have been panicking about them since we left on Thursday. Nobody could get down the road where they are due to flooding and we had multiple tornados in the area last night.
But a family friend got a kayak down there and sent me a grainy, far-off photo. It's hard to tell but I know their faces anywhere! They are standing, not underwater, not blown away, probably thoroughly freaked out and wondering what the hell is going on but OKAY!
My house has major water damage and it's going to take days for the floodwaters to go down and months to rebuild, but that's fine because my horses are alive and I will get to them soon!
We will be removing other self-posts (posts without actual content) for 24 hours to consolidate all discussion to this thread.
This is the official place to discuss S8E21 "Rockhoof and a Hard Place"! Any serious discussion related to the episode goes in here. 'Low effort' comments may be removed! Have fun!
Hiiii again! This is the official place for your reactions to the US Airing of S8E21 "Rockhoof and a Hard Place"! Any initial conversation related to this episode goes in here, and we will be opening another thread for serious discussion a bit after the episode concludes. Keep it civil and have fun, because I said so!
