Apparently, a while back, I gave you some bad advice. In my article How to Decorate Your Horse, I suggested that you color your pony with non-toxic water paints, bingo dabbers or drink mix (non-sweetened) crystals. Little did I know that this was advice that could lead to an activity that was cruel. Someone has decided that painting your pony is inhumane. Even worse, is that using your horse as an artistic canvas is an appropriate activity for children’s parties. Such an activity may impress on impressionable children that a horse is a thing and not a feeling being. And, it's terrifying for a horse to be daubed on with paint brushes, perhaps even painful.
Now, I have, if not actually painted a horse myself, caused one or more to be painted. Little did I know that I was inspiring or causing cruelty. At no time do I believe that I was causing those animals any sort of physical, intellectual or emotional stress. I am wracking my brain, trying to remember if there was any indication of discomfiture by the animal at any point during or after the process. But I can’t think of any behavior on the horse’s part that would indicate that it was in distress. Maybe I’m delusional. We tend to see what we want to see.
During the decorating, the horse was tied. How could it get away when it was imprisoned? Well, at that time it was tied, but there have been other times when I’ve worked with my horse that it was untied. As long as my horse thinks it’s being groomed it will stand unless it notices a yummy diversion. Then it might wander off. Thus the reason for tying. Too many yummy diversions aren’t good for a horse either. And a moving horse can step on toes. That’s cruelty to toes. There have been times when I, for some reason, have stopped grooming and my horse has reminded me, by swinging her large haunches into me, to continue. And of course, it would be cruel not to.
As to emotional cruelty, I haven’t noticed any duress. If several horses in the paddock have endured the humiliation of being decorated, there has never appeared to be any expression of this distress. They didn’t seem any more anxious. Their appetites were just fine. There were no signs of depression. The didn’t show any indication of embarrassment. They didn’t appear to be in pain. Nor did they seem to suffer any bullying or teasing by the non-painted pasture-mates they lived with. They just went on being horses albeit a bit more colorful until the next rainfall.
Now, I will have to agree that we don’t want kids to grow up thinking that horses or any animal are just things to play with until we tire of them. The most important lesson anyone can learn is that horses are thinking feeling animals that deserve respect. Care has to be taken that we don’t hurt them in any way. What better time to teach this to children when they are up close, and having fun? There are a lot of ‘teachable moments’ we can find and they don’t all have to be done from a camouflaged blind with a pair of binoculars. A domestic horse, like a wild horse, and like ourselves needs to work for a living. There is no free ride for anyone. Sometimes, that work can include standing still for a half hour while you become a multicolored rainbow horse. Tough gig.
And you want to be careful what you do when you’re decorating your horse. Decorating with ball point pens is a really bad idea, as are using pointy-ended markers, washable or not. Oil paints, wall paint, car paint, and spray paint are most definitely not acceptable media. And, if while your horse is being decorated, it seems flinchy and uncomfortable, stop and find out why. There’s this thing called common sense that seems far too uncommon.
There is a lot of cruelty out there. But, in the grand scheme of things, painting a pony seems like a pretty tiny fight. If you’re going to take on cruelty, there are bigger fish to fry and more important places to exert your energies.
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