#horse girl (gender neutral)

[andr0nap]

cowboy au but i commit to the lack of horses on no mans land

[andr0nap-wf]

inflicting you with my drifter (woe, dork be upon ye)

their name is misha :)

[quarkscooljacket]

being a horse girl is just the best. my beautiful friends send me pictures of majestic and terrifying beasts all day long

[sometimesanequine]

when you make a bag inspired by your favorite sso saddlebag 💀

[dallasgallant]

I asked a while ago what Soda came to Bucks to get, as it was never specified and someone suggested he just likes looking at the horses.

All I can picture is Dally sneaking him over to the stable* all “you have five minutes”

🧍‍♂️Horse!

They stay more than five minutes. Soda’s horse girl whimsy captivates him. Ten minutes and Dally stares showing him the cool stuff.

*unsure if the ranch and roadhouse are all on the same property

[girderednerve]

so i've been watching the olympics!

i ideologically reject the olympics & they should not be held. however, it is fun to watch sports on television, especially if you, like me, are a fan of weird sports that aren't televised often (equestrian sports!).

there are a lot of problems with equestrian sports, mostly that they're capital-intensive, which is to say that they're inaccessible & elitist. the big controversy this olympics relates to animal welfare, though. there have been scandals in the past, but this year, right before the olympic games, charlotte dujardin, a very famous & celebrated dressage rider, withdrew from competition pending an investigation for animal welfare by the FEI & british dressage federation after the release of a video that is at least two years old (age contested) of her repeatedly striking at the legs of a client's horse with a long whip during a training session. i will note that she has previously had to withdraw from an international competition after blood was found on her horse (they check bits & spurs every round). charlotte dujardin is famous & celebrated because she has had incredibly good, record-breaking results in international competition, despite her relatively young age (gold medalist in her 20s, when people remain competitive in this sport into their 60s). she also competed in international dressage wearing a riding helmet, which was not at all conventional in the 2010s, although it is now in part because of her influence. when she won her gold medals at the 2012 olympics, she was riding at home & was met with a massive swelling of national pride by british viewers.

international dressage competition was dominated by german riders (isabell werth is like, the queen mother of dressage basically), and there had just been a huge controversy about animal welfare centering on the practice of rollkur, a training method in which the horse's head is pulled in very close to their chest, which is a very unnatural way for a horse to move & involves a lot of force exerted on the bit(s) in the horse's mouth. i strongly agree that rollkur is bad and should not be done, but the public discussion about it immediately became extremely messy, because a) some fans were looking for a reason to discount german records & decry german horsemanship and b) we couldn't agree what rollkur actually is! the FEI said that you can't do rollkur, but that it's fine to use a "deep & round" training frame, which is, um, different, because it's not mean? which is nonsense, or at least very difficult to enforce by eye, but sort of understandable; i myself have spent plenty of time on a horse (my beloved friend, strudel the pony) who habitually ducks behind the bit & carries his head low & behind the vertical. while it's straightforward to identify & sanction extreme cases (e.g., patrik kittel's blue-tongued horse), it can be much harder to agree on other instances, keeping in mind that you only see a very small piece of a rider's general practice in competition. judges are supposed to penalize movements in which the horse's head is behind the vertical, but in practice they spent years penalizing carriage in front of the vertical more sharply & consistently (this has begun to shift in the last couple years, but the rollkur stuff was happening in like, 2010). this sport is an old, strange, slow-moving patchwork of styles, full of people who are deeply particular, territorial, & aesthetically conservative. there's also a huge variation in how horses themselves behave; they have character, personality, & preferences. none of which lessens the burden of responsibility on riders & people who work with horses to make sure that they are cared for well, but does make adjudicating an individual case complicated. of course, it's also intensely emotionally charged, because we are, & ought to be, outraged by animal abuse.

anyway the thing i'm trying to get at is that we don't have a cultural consensus on what animal welfare in equestrian sports ought to look like. i realize that sounds like rank apologia, which i am not trying to do; i have not watched the video of charlotte dujardin in the training session, because i don't have the stomach for it & am not interested in trying to argue about this one case. the bigger & more interesting issue to me is that i think there's a general cultural shift, in the sport & beyond it, around what we think is appropriate to ask from a horse. like i said, people have long careers in this sport, & it's culturally conservative on its own; i rode a couple times with a celebrated british rider whose father was responsible for determining which horses to care for & which to put down during world war ii (!!!), which obviously accompanied an extremely different attitude towards horses & the labor we expect from them than anything you might find in a modern barn. many of these determinations about equine welfare are being conducted on the public stage, by people who have never spent significant time around horses; the video of dujardin hitting a horse aired on good morning britain. there's also a vibrant, very opinionated amateur community, who have spent time with horses but aren't professionals. i do think there's a meaningful difference between having a horse who is your buddy & spending all day working with horses, having sort of done both; i don't think it's particularly edgy to say that you treat an activity differently when it's your job than when it's a thing you're doing for fun & stress relief.

when i was taught to ride, i was told (& of course believed!) that it's fine & appropriate to punch a horse with my stupid seven-year-old fists if they knocked me around with their big horse faces, which made me feel weird when kim raisner was banned from the german pentathlon team for same, but then she obviously was not seven. i'm not quite sure what i think about it; the argument in favor of smacking a horse is that they're big & dangerous if they don't have manners, & in my experience they didn't really care. i feel some shame & conflict about this now that i am years away from working with horses, but i also recall trying to make sure that the horses i was around knew me & weren't afraid of me. we had solid working relationships from my perspective, but of course i can't go back & ask the horses. increasingly, i think excellent animal welfare is probably just not compatible with large-scale competitive sport, or, perhaps, with a capitalist environment. hot take, i guess!

one thing i think about a lot is that while there obviously is money in dressage, there's not nearly as much money in it as there is in horse racing, which is, from my perspective, a hugely destructive & cruel industry for horses & for people. horses die racing. people die caring for them, almost all of them undocumented barn workers. dressage defines itself in opposition to this approach—many amateurs pride themselves upon the differences—but i'm not convinced that the kinder ideas we have now of how to coexist with animals scale with revenue-generating industry, even outside of racing.

anyway, it makes people uncomfortable, and it makes me uncomfortable too. i think we'll see some comparatively rapid change in the next five years or so. the future of equestrian sports in the olympics is in question, as the olympics desperately try to stay relevant & interesting to younger generations (do kids like, uh, breakdancing? skateboarding? metal bands???). there's also an image crisis more broadly. the olympic ideal has shifted over the years, but a lot of the people involved in planning the games have self-aggrandizing ideas about what they're doing & the utopian potential of sports. equestrian sports have a martial history, which commentary generally elides, but is revealing in its way about the historical purpose of the olympiad. if the public conversation is focused on how this sport, which is expensive to put on & pulls low viewership numbers, is a harm to horses (&, in the popular mind, is not so much a sport as an exercise in expensive sitting, cf. the comedy around the romney-owned dressage horse), then the whole facade is crumbling. i guess it's better for the IOC for us all to worry about charlotte dujardin's heavy whip hand than it is for us to ask why israel is competing, or how well the unhoused people of paris are faring during these expensive spectacles, but surely they'd rather we set aside those conversations to talk about how inspiring the whole games are.

[megaawkwardhuman]

nandor was an og horse girl no I will not elaborate 

[mercless]

is there something specific about cowboys , high noon , or the western / western gothic genre that draws you in ? 🤠

honestly! until recently the western theming wasn't even something i leaned towards outside of the humble 'howdy' 'yeehaw' or 'ya'll' thrown into my speech for fun... i think the biggest factor for my piqued interest into particular western themed characters has been my interest with horror and gothic imagery, media, etc. which ties in with the more niche western gothic.

so i suppose it was the skinline thematic itself which drew me in; the aftermath of the end times, and the world that followed after. what happens if hell is real, devils and demons a constant threat, and if this was all set in a time of developing technology that destroyed the very land and it was dug out from.

but... i think im just easily obsessed with edgy lonely brooding characters and they keep wearing large hats and speaking with a drawl recently 🧍‍♂️

[cicicolorao]

Minty my beloved she's so silly and also the best character.

If I posted this on my old blog uuuuuuuuuh. oops. repost. I genuinely can't remember

[actualbird]

// cn server spoilers, marius bday3 pv

okay enough depression about the marius bday3 cards, it's time for the Little Delights

kid!marius seems to like marine mammals :'D

marius, 7 yrs old and preparing for a class sharing activity or something: my favorite animal is the aquarian serpent!

giann: you cant say that in class, it's not a real animal

marius: awww...is there any real animal that swims in the ocean and has a cool horn then?

giann, about to introduce marius to the wonders of narwhals and orcas: well-

[bosspigeon]

Ayyyy I'm finally doing this! Thanks to @dangerous-disposition for the tag <3

Uuuh I'll tag @popcornaddict500 @queenbol-of-baldurs-gate @thinlyveiledselfinsert and @karshmallow

[roguemonsterfucker]

Okay but what about an orc blacksmith/farrier and an equestrian 🤔

[badolmen]

You really can’t go wrong with adding a fucked up horse. Fucked up deer are good, yes, but there’s connotations - the natural distorted, racist caricatures of indigenous spirits you should avoid portraying, etc etc but horses? Horses exist because of human interventions. If there’s a fucked up horse this isn’t some karmatic nature-takes-revenge schtick this horse is fucked up and it knows it’s fucked up and it knows it exists because of humans like you.

[corvidiss]

when someone calls an animal “old girl” i'm like screaming kicking biting oh my GOD she's weathered!! she's wise!! they've been friends for years and they know her so well!! she's a vibrant yet gentle soul!!! they have a bond that could write legends and she is valued for her experience and her reliability!!!!!

[i-will-not-be-caged]

I have Kentucky Derby coverage on in the background (because once a horse girl, always a horse girl) and every time there’s a live race I pick which horse to root for based on whose silks are closest to the trans flag 🏳️‍⚧️

[waxingwintersun]

speaking of taking figures out of their boxes, i should post abt my model horses one of these days :) theyre my cringiest pride and joy