Horse Vent

So in competitive English riding, there are three main disciplines: Hunter/Jumper, Dressage, and Eventing. I do h/j specifically hunters. This was originally intended to simulate field hunting, so the jumps are made of natural materials, and the horses are supposed to flow around and not spook at stuff. Jumpers jump bright colored stuff and go fast. It is easy for lay people to understand because they are trying to beat the clock.

Dressage is the pretty dancing that you see with the riders wearing top hats.

Eventing has a dressage component, a jumper component, and a cross country component that take place over three days. Here is where my vent lies. The eventers are nuts! They have changed their scoring criteria and they have changed the cross country courses to be much more technical and difficult but have also lowered the required times to complete these courses. This means that they gallop, hell bent, for all these really tricky fences.

How is this different than jumpers you ask? Jumper jumps fall down! Cross country folks go galloping across natural terrain and jump solid fences that don't move when you hit them. That means that if a horse catches his front end on one, then he has a VERY real shot at flipping over and breaking his or his rider's neck. There was a front page article about this in the NYTimes a couple weeks ago. Then this weekend TWO MORE horses has to be put down because of falls on the cross country course, and a rider is in critical condition with a broken jaw, ribs, collar bone, etc. These are top level people, so you can't even say that novice riders are causing the accidents.

It just annoys me so much that so many horses have been lost in recent years due to ridiculous changes in the sport. It also worries me that animal rights folks won't differentiate between the disciplines and will start making trouble for all of us. Sorry for the rant. I'm just upset about the situation on several different levels.

Hunters


Jumpers


Dressage


Cross Country