#or trot

[madrivervalleyicelandics]

TW pet loss

Big long reflection post under the cut. Wanted to say it all somewhere that doesn’t have a character limit.

We are about a year out from when we put our two mares diagnosed with ESPA to sleep. Ultimately losing them has caused me to really sit with & unpack the way I had allowed the judging & breed standards to impair, inform, & even BECOME my own judgement, even when they didn’t make sense or clashed with something I knew wasn’t right. I think we all need to become more honest about the root of our sports & traditions, & redefine our ideas of “correctness” not based off of historical trends but the best & most current research we have access to.

I liked Skvísa from the start because she was hypermobile & that made her talented & easy to prepare for sport. Bottom line. Hypermobility wins, the standard calls it correct & rewards it, & I followed & believed in the standard. I didn’t see her hypermobility for what it was until recently. I saw it as talent, suppleness, flexibility.

If I hadn’t bred her, she’d have lived an almost normal lifespan, which is true of many ESPA horses. She always had some sensitivity & required a lot of careful stabilizing training to stay balanced with a rider (particularly to keep her trot & avoid cross-canter), but she would have more or less been okay for the normal lifespan of a horse. Her fetlocks might have dropped in her late teens, she might have developed an unusual propensity for eye ulcers or colics or whatever but if I hadn’t - twice! - allowed her body to undergo 11 months of relaxin & weight gain followed by a year+ of pasture time afterwards, she’d have lived a more or less normal life, & I can almost guarantee she’d have retired undiagnosed & whatever eventually killed her wouldn’t have prompted us to make the connection & diagnose her.

She only got diagnosed because for whatever reason her kids expressed this hereditary disease to a much more extreme degree, & with a much faster progression. Síríus was incompatible with life because his larynx lacked integrity & stuck together when he flexed his neck, blocking his airway. His older sister, Sylgja, seemed normal at birth but presented with extreme nerve impingements as she grew, & was crippled & experiencing whole-body pain episodes by 5. I got to see her get better under my stabilizing training & then watch her completely fall apart worse than before & realize that it was my responsibility, entirely, from her conception right down to the bitter, early end.

What happened to these horses is 100% my responsibility & my fault, the result of choices I made. But I made those choices based on the education I received regarding what “correctness” is & looks like - a standard I was then very heavily reinforced for riding & training towards.

Since my mares’ deaths, I’ve learned about enough other Icelandic horses with this disease, & talked to enough people who fully don’t care & have no intention to change anything that I’ve all but completely removed myself from the breed community. I won’t be told this was an isolated or unlucky problem for me specifically when I know that I’m not alone. I won’t continue to use language that dances around what we’re doing when we endlessly rehab the same problems over & over again - horses losing trot, losing canter, getting pacey, crests falling over, etc etc etc. I can’t see the sense in continuing to chase an “outline” that requires inappropriate poll/AO compression & a degree of leg action that does not make sense to the animal’s anatomy, with no research to support these practices and so MUCH research indicating that this runs counter to welfare, while mindlessly parroting the standards & citing them as the reason why X hypermobile hyperflexed example is “correct.” It’s a feedback loop. We’re saying that the horse is correct if he scores high, but he scores high because he’s correct.

It makes no sense. It’s rooted in nothing. The standard was written to fit the trends - it’s not as if science informed the standard & THEN the sport followed. No! The sport came first. That’s true of Icelandic horses, true of saddleseat, Tennessee walkers, hell - it’s true of competitive dressage. Honestly? It’s true of classical dressage, too! We are riding to standards set by a bunch of dudes from a very long time ago based off of what they thought 1. Looked cool & 2. Felt cool to ride, with NONE of the knowledge we currently have about training science, biomechanics, equine behavior, etc. As recently as the 1970s, scientists were still claiming animals couldn’t feel pain. Think about how that mentality informed horse training!!

We retrofitted rules to match & reward what was already winning, in these early iterations of sport. We continue to do mental & linguistic gymnastics to maintain this status quo with every new study that emerges. We know SO MUCH MORE now. We have progressed rapidly in the last century, last 50 years especially. Equestrian sports NEED an update. The onus can’t just be on the riders to find ways to meet the standards using better, more evidence-based techniques. The sport standards themselves have to change to fit what we KNOW now.

Anyway. Not all hypermobility is ESPA, obviously, and many ESPA horses can live long, relatively okay lives with careful management - if they’re diagnosed and the owners know & can stop riding them & certainly not breed them. It’s worth learning how to manage hypermobility, & how to use certain training techniques to help stabilize hypermobile horses, because the world is now absolutely freaking flooded with them. But until we stop rewarding it so heavily, we won’t stop selecting for it, & as I learned the hard way - when you’re breeding hypermobile animals, you can’t control how that hypermobility expresses itself down the line. AND - ESPA isn’t the only disease or injury associated with selecting for hypermobility.

Bottom line: No horse deserves what happened to Sylgja, in particular. She suffered, and longer than she should have because it took me so long to figure out what was wrong.

Because of this experience with them, my life looks completely different than it did a year ago, & in my opinion every single change is very much for the better. Identifying and learning to manage my own hypermobility & connective tissue weirdness has been a piece of that puzzle. I owe very much to those mares, but that is not what horses are here for. They do not exist to suffer so that we can learn about ourselves.

I considered what it would look like to step away from horsekeeping entirely, & in the heaviest months of grief that felt extremely attractive. But where I landed is to recommit myself to understanding their minds & bodies, be a student again (the trauma-informed certification being the first step of that!) & reconnect with my own horses more as pets, & less through sport. Beyond that, I really can’t say what my future with horses holds.

Right now I’m focusing on healing & supporting my own body, & building up other areas of my life. My own horses are not in the back seat, but they’re on this journey alongside me, rather than BEING my journey. I think it’s the amount of distance & clarity I need from the various pressures & stressors of The Sport to avoid falling back into the cycles that blinded me to Skvísa’s dysfunction to begin with.

I hope that when all is said & done, I emerge from all this grief & shifting to find that I am a better horseman than I was when they left me. Time will tell.

But I can’t let a year go by without acknowledging it. They died about a year ago. It was the worst experience of my life, from Síríus’ birth to Sylgja & Skvísa’s last breaths. I miss them daily. I feel the weight of my responsibility for them & their pain always, & I always will.

And if I haven’t said it publicly, I am so, so sorry for what happened to them.

[dharmaart]

This year has been quite trying, but I'm happy that I discovered a love of making these horse animations in 2023.

[drchucktingle]

Across the wide world of the Tingleverse, one thing is clear: love is real 

But, for many buckaroos, their preferred kind of love has nothing to do with sex or romance. Whether asexual or just not feeling it at the moment, this collection of completely sexless tales is perfect for the desires of any readers who are looking for a non-sexual trip through the alternate timelines of Dr. Chuck Tingle.

----

NOT POUNDED BY ANYTHING VOL. 4 is out today as a paperback trot. six more platonic tales for your collection of no sex tinglers. LOVE IS REAL

GET PAPERBACK HERE

[zoe-oneesama]

Let Me Play You a Song

Ko-fi | Patreon

[imavillainok]

sassy big bro and his cute lil bro

[blackkatdraws2]

The narrator and the ugly ahh protagonist [Blank Scripts AU/non-canonical]

[fluffyartbl0g]

Everytime I go into the Zosopp tag, I just see people SCREAMING CRYING SOBBING about the lack of posts IN the Zosopp tag. THE ZOSOPP ECONOMY IS IN SHAMBLES

[amanonthecorner]

This one goes out to all the buckaroos whose trot has been SIGNIFICANTLY IMPROVED by the art of @drchucktingle

[toucheholland23]

Magma Dood for y’all 🙏💖

[lyctorism]

[dharmaart]

A horse trotting

My attempt at animating trot using pencil, black calligraphy ink, and a bit of white gouache. The horse is moving away from the viewer at a bit of an angle so it was more difficult than my other attempts. I'm still very new to this so please don't judge it too harshly.

[drchucktingle]

NEW DAY NEW CHANCE TO PROVE LOVE. LETS TROT

[phoenixcatch7]

I get that calling white lotus lbh a sticky little 'sheep' is a canon translation and stuck in the fandom now anyway, but I do feel the intended spirit of the original word wasn't the sheeple/dumb herd animal that's more common in the western world, but instead something actually conveying sweetness, innocence, purity and youth - lamb.

Famous for being utterly adorable and following around their mothers, gambolling in sunny meadows, curly white wool shining.

And NOW we can talk about black sheep/wolf in sheep's clothing metaphors.

[zoe-oneesama]

I totally forgot that I made these to throw off my patrons when I made my spread of the 3 of them in their space forms.

Ko-fi

[starflungwaddledee]

running a little late, but someone's finally arriving at the @kirbyoctournament !

sent in to the tourney by her well meaning friends, starstruck is a Totally Normal adult waddle dee from king dedede's kingdom of dream land! she's here to try and meet new people, and maaaybe get out of her anxious shell a little bit!

equipped with her customary cheerful attitude, she's also sporting a brand new backpack full of lovingly packed goodies to help her through the event.

if you'd like to get to know her a little better, you can check out her tag on my blog, or these three important comics from previously! lastly, you can find the masterpost for her interactive tournament adventure here! this is an ongoing chronological story (separate to her canon story, but referencing it) that will last for as long as she's in the tournament!

a few notes for any interactions

🌸 despite being a waddle dee, other waddle dees typically don't like being around her, and folks who already know what a waddle dee should be like also tend to get a weird vibe off her. 🌸 she is quite friendly and approachable, but prone to extreme anxiety if she perceives she might have done something wrong or inappropriate. tiny wanya takes criticism the way a handful of hay takes a flame. 🌸 if you have wings and you take her flying she'll never leave your side. she's only palm sized, so if you are big and have wings or can fly, please pick her up and go flying with her please please pleeaase she wants to go go flying and fawn over your wings so so bad 🌸 for the purposes of the tourney, which by merit of its existence is something of an au timeline, consider this event to completely predate her ability to summon these.

[hedgehog-moss]

u are genuinely one of my favorite blogs i love ur posts so much they feel so nice and peaceful :)

Thank you! <3

I'm offering you this rare star alignment (of sleeping llamas) I saw out of my window the other day, it will bring you good luck in all endeavours: