lasatfat:

lasatfat:

All the news outlets are talking about how much of a nightmare it was for Annika Schleu that her horse wouldn’t jump, but nothing about how she was filmed repeatedly and violently whipping the horse, or her coach was filmed punching the horse and telling her to whip it harder.

Horses aren’t just fuzzy bikes, they’re living, breathing animals, and they don’t deserve to be abused just because you didn’t get a pretty piece of metal. This needs to be brought to light and it needs to be stopped.

I just want to clarify that I’m not advocating for banning equestrian sports, necessarily - I believe that it’s possible to regulate and/or restructure most of these sports so that they’re safer for both horses and humans. 

I think that behaviour like Schleu’s is unacceptable, and it’s shocking to me that nobody seems to be talking about it. Such flagrant abuse of an animal cannot be tolerated, especially not at such a high level with such a wide audience. Schleu and her coach both need to be prosecuted. We cannot allow this to be normalized further.