Over the years, this blog has had some fairly extreme reactions - often from people in the real world getting offended by what I have to say. Usually because of posts questioning the "traditional" way of doing something.
Someone once had a real go at me after reading this blog post . Apparently it was a personal attack on the way they kept their horses. And I am not alone, I have just today read this blog where a fellow advocate of keeping horses barefoot was accused of spreading "blasphemy". Any mention of things like riding barefoot or bitless usually gets people writing unpleasant comments on social media, and the name calling starts. "Fluffy bunny" is my favourite so far.....
But all we fluffy bunnies are doing is trying to make the lives of our horses as pleasant as we can. Trouble is, the horse kept in a lovely clean, dry stable most of his time, wearing a nice new rug, with regular schooling sessions with an expensive trainer and frequent excursions to a show in shiny new tack with his mane all pulled, whiskers trimmed and mouth strapped shut is having what his owner presumably thinks is the best life possible too. And these owners can't entertain for one second the idea that they might be wrong. That they might not understand their precious horse, they might be missing all the times he is trying to communicate with them, that they might be causing his lameness or colic or ulcers with unnecessary shoeing or limited turnout or unnatural feeding regimes.
And this I suppose is what makes them so cross. They need to feel that they are right in what they are doing, so we must be wrong. Maybe at the back of their mind there is a niggling doubt that there could be something in what we're saying but they'd rather not acknowledge it, so it's easier to get cross and have a go at someone than to question their own knowledge.
But getting people to question things is one of the reasons I started this blog. And among all the nasty comments and negative reactions, if there is just one person, somewhere, who reads it and starts thinking that maybe they could change some aspect of their horse's life to allow him time to be a horse just a little more, then it's worth it. So I shall continue......
