Something Ugly About Fugly

If you're an equestrian it's hard to be unaware of the web-presence that the Fugly Horse of the Day blog commanded. Often referred to as FHOTD, by far it was the most popular horse blog on the internet, even as the content quality took a nosedive while being shuffled around from one blogger to another. A majority of posts earning a thousand comments or more, it was obvious that people were not only ready Fugly, they were engaged.

Then it was gone.

Fugly had an easy time (can we say shooting fish in a barrel?) finding poorly-bred, abused and neglected horses to write about, along with an endless supply of ignorant “horse people”. The original blogger coupled her posts with encouragement to adopt horses rather than buy from breeders, to geld stallions and be responsible about breeding.

And people flocked to the blog in droves, head-nodding in agreement that the blogger was right, these poor idiots were wrong. And somewhere caught in the middle were horses of no value because they were so poorly conformed, cared for or trained. But it's always easiest to point the finger at other people even when we're not perfect ourselves.

I never really jumped on the band-wagon of the Fugly Horse blog; to me it represented a witch hunt more than an educational platform to actually improve the lives of horses further down the line.

Why? Because it never addressed the real problems. Equestrians are not being educated, or are receiving sub-standard education. Lessons are expensive, egos are big (“I don't need to learn how to ride a horse, just get on and go!”), and horses are disposable. No one wants to buy the horse they should get, and instead they want to buy the pretty horse or young horse or the __________ horse.

What I see are horse people who are buying a horse who is completely wrong for them, who then feel like they should be able to make it work with any horse, try to tough it out and force the horse to get along with them. There is zero trust-building in the process and in the end they have either a horse who has completely given up or a horse who refuses to give in and is deemed unsuitable/untrainable/stubborn/dangerous/aggressive, etc.

I was involved for a number of years with a breed where the MAJORITY of breeders had originally been looking to buy a saddle-trained horse in the breed, could only find young stud colts or fillies (< 2 years old) and got side-tracked from their original goal (buying a trained horse) instead turning into a backyard breeder. To complete the picture, their breeding horses never went on to become trained riding horses, and often the foals were being sold with little to no training as well. Bad conformation, wormy and underweight foals, and no proven performance/trainability in the bloodline.

Where Fugly Horse dropped the ball was in assuming that horse people were educated enough to know they were making huge breeding/care/training mistakes. The true reality was not hard to see; that horse people being burned on the blog honestly thought they had a clue.

I've said it before and I'll continue to harp on this; equestrians need to feel that education is affordable, essential and NORMAL for riders of all ages, disciplines and experience. If you wanted to fly an airplane you wouldn't just go buy a twin-engine and fly it home without any lessons. And yet every day people buy horses with zero hands on experience or lessons to guide them. Why? Because that is considered the norm and education is not. Yet.

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