In my ever so humble opinion.....

Sometimes in the middle of a heated debate or even an interesting conversation someone says or types something that makes me go “WHAT the Hell?!”. Yes, the “wth what is that all about” moments actually happen pretty regularly. I’m talking about the rendering me speechless for a few minutes and in my head I am screaming... WHAT THE HELL moment. I had one of those moments a few weeks ago while reading on a horse forum. It was a slaughter debate that I was reading and there were the usual heart felt emotional and horribly miss spelled “ all horsie’s are special” posts and of course the ones where the people who disagree with the ban on horse slaughter in the USA are called all sorts of names from greedy and stupid to murderers.
Now I have always had a pretty strong opinion about what horses are more likely to end up in a slaughter plant. I have always taught my children and my 4-H children, their parents, and other students who have ears and an interest in horses that you can be the cause of the problem or not. We prefer NOT. I teach them to not create the type of horse that often ends up with only one place to go. Certainly if you are against slaughter then do not create a product for that market.
My Opinion is that a well trained, amicable horse has a better chance of keeping a job and home. I also feel strongly that an ill-conformed horse has a higher chance of being a cripple with one last market value in front of him. I also have a strong opinion about genetic diseases. We read that the highest number of horses going to kill is the quarter horse. I often wonder to myself, ”how many of those were shipped due to HYPP? How many horses in all the breeds are shipped to sale or slaughter because they have severe enough symptoms of one of the many genetic diseases that have been bred into them? HYPP is usually the first one on my list of BAAAAD genes to breed simply because it only takes one positive to cause problems. I also have a lot of experience with HYPP affected horses as I worked in a research barn full of symptomatic horses for a while shortly after the test became available.
I’m never shocked to hear about breeders that breed for hypp pos. horses, I knew one some years ago. However, here I was reading through this thread and came across a post from an anti slaughter, anti horse auction advocate who shows halter only and she says that Hypp horses are the only ones that win, that's all she owns and all she will buy! I was astonished that a person who purports themselves to be “the biggest horse advocate we’ll meet” would promote the breeding of horses who may and often do suffer and die from this genetic mutation. She was called out on that by another member of the forum, she quickly denied that she promotes such a thing.... ummm really? WTH?! She also could not understand why her purchasing these horses from the breeder was in any way promoting the breeding of hypp horses. AGAIN WTH!?
I’m sorry but I just don’t get the stupidity of some people and I sure don’t understand how a person so against horse slaughter or selling a horse at auction due to the cruelty and greed of it can think that continuing the breeding of HYPP positive horses is not a problem. Yep, no greed or cruelty there folks.
So, in my ever so humble opinion, If you are too stupid to understand that you can’t be part of the solution if you are part of the problem then you should probably not be a horse owner at all!

R.M.

http://www.vgl.ucdavis.edu/services/hypp.php

http://www.bringinglighttohypp.org/