Recent content by Burnttoast

It's been said often enough that if horses vocalised like dogs none of this stuff would be happening to them.

We may disagree on some other things, but I couldn't agree more with you on this.

Here are some quite astonishing oral (and other) conflict behaviours very recently from a horse that's clearly struggling on multiple fronts. At the beginning, the mouth is gaping even when the reins are given entirely for significant periods. Strikes me as a complete rejection by this poor...

How does that argument work when the colour of the tongue may not be 'accurately' rendered but it still clearly differs from the mucosa or even more pertinently the colour of the tongue above the bit, where visible. Frankly the idea that we are ever able to see the tongue above the bit...

Proving it in a way the FEI would accept is another matter I suspect.

Failing to provide raw images is a problem but most of us who are trying to make a judgement with the evidence available to us, and are not necessarily in a position to obtain or analyse those images, can also rely on other evidence that suggests that the horse is experiencing discomfort (unless...

That seems to relate to lesions, rather than ischemia, although it wouldn't be surprising if the two go together. There was a long thread on David Marlin's page too where he was saying we needed research to determine if a blue tongue is painful. The director of elite sport at the Danish...

? I was referring to the likelihood of the FEI demanding proof that spur damage looked a certain way on thermal scanning, and the likelihood of being allowed to do a study that recreated such damage on actual horses to find out what it looked like in that scenario. They spend a lot of time...

Useful paper thank you - I was just thinking of the FEI's propensity to demand complete proof of pain/harm when it comes to things like blue tongues and whether they would just say 'well, warmth under the rider's leg is because the rider is warm', or some such nonsense, and demand an ethically...

I'm basically just reposting everything from CplC here.. Whacking your horse in the mouth is still as uncool as it ever was. https://www.facebook.com/reel/1460177052118223/

T Tack checks have ostensibly improved, that's true, but I'm not sure most of the riders are happy about that and you will still read about grooms etc positioning themselves to block the view of inadequate checks. Riders are mostly a long way from wanting genuine accountability I feel.

Yes absolutely. Spurs are not knives. How long do you have to bludgeon away to weaken the skin so much it will bleed?

The warmbloods I rode were 30 years ago (Muschamp breeding competing to GP, a Holstein (PSG), Belgian wb like a bus, a few others) and I found them fine to sit on, just a lot to organise (I am little with short legs). Things may well be *very* different now, but the training will still make a...

Is it? That's interesting. I was thinking that given the FEI's propensity to argue the toss over every little thing (eg we must do research to find out if blue tongues = pain, otherwise we carry on as usual) that they would consider it infringing on the rider's freedoms to actually examine the...

Interesting idea, they'd never agree to it of course. And you'd never get a study on it as a method past an ethics board :(