Posts Tagged ‘tacky’
Are you illiterate, or just asshats?
I was at another schooling show this weekend. It drew a large crowd and most classes had over 20 participants. It was your typical mix of trainers on green horses and youth/adult amateur riders getting practice for the show season ahead with a smattering of true beginners (some frighteningly overmounted) on their shaggy backyard beasts. However, there was one thing that really got my goat and I’m going to talk about it today.
The classes included a Novice Walk-Trot pleasure class, which was very clearly marked as being for horses who have never won a blue ribbon. This information was not buried in the fine print of the show’s rules – it was actually written out in plain English directly after the title of the class in the class list. Imagine my surprise when I saw a girl entering the ring that I myself had just seen win classes at the last show just a few weeks ago, a girl on a beautiful Appaloosa who was clearly broke to death and then some, sideways lope, wringing tail and all.
(Actually, it wasn’t wringing this show. Clearly someone had had their little shot! This show, it was dead as a doornail.)
Is she lost, I wondered? Surely her trainer will see that she has entered the wrong class and signal her out. Maybe she’s schooling? But she was wearing her number.
Yep. Ms. Breed Show Appy proceeded to win yet another blue ribbon, taking a chance for a ribbon away from the kids in nylon bridles, the genuinely green horses and the adult riders who were in there for the very first time. So you know what we’re gonna do today? We’re gonna talk about how much that sucks on this blog! 
This particularly offender is a client of Capstone Farm. (You really shouldn’t wear your barn jacket while do unethical stuff like this, just a hint). Although you can always recognize the riders from this farm with or without their jackets, as they are endlessly violently snatching on their poor horses’ faces. The horse’s name is Too Good To Pass and the rider is Kim Dyberg. The trainer is Sarah Aron. Sarah, Kim, are you two illiterate so that you can’t read a show bill, or are you just jerks? Which is it? I’m curious. I don’t really think you’re illiterate, because it’d be hard for illiterate people to afford a horse like this one. I’m sure he cost a lot! And I am pretty sure at least one of you had a show bill in your possession, and from your web site, you are not color blind and do understand what a blue ribbon is, and that this horse already has many of them. So what the fuck is your excuse for going in Novice Walk-Trot with that horse? I notice you do not mention “good sportsmanship” in your expansive list of qualities training at your barn will teach a child. At least you are not hypocrites, I guess I gotta give you that!
Just for fun, I googled “Too Good To Pass” to see what I could see about his prior accomplishments. Well, let’s see. He got a 6th at the Reichert Celebration, OK, I guess that’s not a blue ribbon but common sense should tell you right there that’s not a horse you should be going up against 4-H kids with. Next thing I found was that he was all-around high point senior exhibitor Appaloosa at the Lope On In open shows…LAST YEAR! Yes, I had a feeling that the blues I saw him win before were pretty typical for the horse. Oooh, here’s a good one. He was the 2007 World Champion ApPHA Non Pro Youth 5 and Under Pleasure Maturity Winner! Kim, Sarah, did you REALLY put a WORLD CHAMPION PLEASURE HORSE in a class that was for horses who have NEVER won a blue ribbon? Yes, yes you did. WOW.
Gosh, I hope that blue ribbon was worth it!
So let’s talk about this in general today. How do we make this crap stop? I’ve worked in a show office and told people they couldn’t go in the class if I knew their horse had won blues. But I think a lot of times the show offices are staffed by volunteers who don’t recognize the names and know what’s up. So my take on this is that it’s the TRAINER’S job to ensure this doesn’t happen. You know what’s in your barn and you know what it’s won. It’s your job to be honest and ethical and not put it into classes it’s already won its way out of.
Thoughts?
OK, we have an update! Sarah says the judge told Kym it was ok for her to show in Novice! So now we get to play “who is lying.” I’m dying to hear from the judge whether she said it was ok to ignore the printed rules of the show. Sarah is claiming they donated the ribbons back to the show and that makes it ok. No, it doesn’t. If you were schooling and did not care about the ribbons, you should have flipped your number and not taken the ribbons in the first place. You still took a ribbon away from a deserving person who actually qualified to go in the class. I honestly don’t care if the judge did say that (which I bet they deny but we’ll see how this develops). YOU should know better. Common sense should tell you it is not fair to put your World Champion in the Novice Horse Not to Have Ever Won a Blue Ribbon class.
And the loser is…
Whenever I post a story like the one about Hercules (original blog here), I know that there are those of you in my audience who would like to believe the best in people. You think, well, maybe his owner was very poor, or sick, or died. Maybe they had no choice at all. Maybe they were young and just didn’t know. You want to believe there’s some reasonable explanation for their beautiful old horse winding up in a kill pen. Then there’s me — I’ve been in rescue long enough to know that a lot of people JUST SUCK. They’re greedy, they’re selfish, they take the easy way out and to Hell with the suffering they cause. After finding out who dumped Hercules and his little white donkey friend, I have had that belief confirmed once again.
Yep, it only took days before I was able to confirm with multiple sources who recognized the horse and were able to describe the woman and her facility perfectly that the person who’d had a big bay Thoroughbred matching Herc’s description on stall rest with a little white donkey was Wendy Hsue (formerly Wendy Jones) of Storybook Farm in Issaquah, Washington. Wendy, shown at left, is no starving teenager – she’s the wife of an affluent, albeit shady, dentist named Kuzi Hsue. Here she is riding poorly on her new toy, a Haflinger. Poor Haflinger, I hope someone else buys it before IT gets old and broken! Check out the heart bodyclipped into its butt. I guess that heart means “I love you as long as you’re sound and able to compete.”
Wendy has a lovely, leased facility called Storybook Farm (assessed last year at $1.8 million dollars) and an approved Swedish Warmblood stallion called Cinzano that she has had in dressage training and been showing (yep, Wendy – not broke!), but somehow, despite having no lack of funds or facilities, Wendy could not bring herself to provide for her old retired show jumper, Hercules, whose real name was – get this – “Tiny.” Nor could she stick a crowbar into her wallet and pry out the equivalent of one lousy designer handbag to send Tiny over the Rainbow Bridge in a quick and painless, vet-assisted way. After trying unsuccessfully to dump him on Craigslist, because after all there aren’t a lot of homes for a lame 17 hand horse that will eat you out of house and home, off to the auction he went, along with his little white companion donkey.
Here’s the ad – helpfully saved by someone else who thought it was sad that Wendy was dumping him!
Goofy giant looking for retirement home. – $1 (Issaquah)
Reply to: sale-j5bzq-1251959656@craigslist.org
[Errors when replying
to ads? ]
Date: 2009-07-03, 9:15AM PDT
17.2H, bay 18yrs TB gelding, he is a total charactor and fun to be around.
Tiny was an upper level event horse (3rd/4th level dressage jumped 5+’) but
has an injury, not lame but not sound for competition. Really looking for a
pasture type retirement home for him. Only maintenance he needs is shoes and
hay in the winter. He is like a big dog comes when he is called, loves on
everyone and tries to play all the time. Good with other horses but
terrified of minis, they chase him. Email me at wmkjones@msn.com or call
425/463-8575
* Location: Issaquah
* it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial
interests
PostingID: 1251959656
The story is just an endless sea of weirdness. She claimed to love this horse, and had owned him for a long time, in fact, ever since he left the track – but thought it was perfectly acceptable to end his life by taking him to Enumclaw and telling Ron she wanted him to go to kill! Â I cannot wrap my mind around how you can even BE that fucked up in the head.
Well, Wendy, from what everybody tells me, you LOVE to be the center of attention. Â So today, you get to BE the center of attention, right here on the Fugly blog! In fact, I will personally proclaim you the Asshat Queen! Â Look, you’re royalty!
So here’s what I have to say:
- Good LORD, your jumping sucks. This poor horse more than deserved retirement for the rest of his life for putting up with how you ride, if that pic at left is any example. From what I hear, you ran him into the ground, rode him lame, crashed him over jumps etc. and that’s why he’s so f’ed up now. Congrats. Good job, you waste of peroxide.
- Not everybody loves you. I know! I know, it’s just so hard to imagine for your cute little blonde self, but there are people out there who think you’re a jerk and who gleefully ran to me with all the info about how you left YOUR OLD SHOW HORSE at Enumclaw to be shoved into a double-decker and driven to Canada. Just how comfortable did you think your 17 hand horse was gonna be in a double-decker, Wendy? Did you ever think about that? I just can’t get over how someone justifies to themselves that this is an acceptable way to “dispose of” their old show horse. WTF. Did you sell your soul to the Devil in exchange for your cushy lifestyle or what?
- If you are trying to make a horse disappear quietly, taking it to the Enumclaw auction is kind of like putting it on a VH-1 reality show. EVERYBODY SEES IT THERE. Also, I hear you’ve been a frequent flyer at Enumclaw, so EVERYBODY THERE KNOWS AND RECOGNIZES YOU, TOO. Wow, wouldn’t coughing up $400 for that euth and disposal have been a heck of a lot better bargain than the damage to your reputation from this little drama? Â I don’t delude myself that I can convince people like you of the value of doing the right thing. Â If you were going to do the right thing, you would have on your own, because you could have never lived with doing what you did. I only hope to convince people like you that $400 is better than winding up on this blog.
- Kill buyers like Ron have loyalty to one thing. It’s green and has a dead President on it. When Ron tells you a horse is “kill only,” he means “unless someone else offers me more money in which case I will grab it and giggle all the way to the bank about how I scammed the silly bleeding heart rescue girl.” In any event, it’s totally irrelevant because at that point, everybody had already seen and photographed your horse in the auction pen. The story about him was on the Internet before the auction was over. Welcome to 2010 and modern technology!
Oh, and one last helpful tip, Wendy:
When you know that you are about to be featured on the Fugly blog, and don’t tell me nobody gave you the heads-up that most of the PNW was looking for the villain who dumped a huge bay gelding and a little white donkey at Enumclaw — not like THAT happens every day — you might want to move into “damage control” mode. Telling your husband to pull down his posts on the Ferrari Owner’s Message Board would have been a good start. Owning a fucking Ferrari but refusing to pay for euthanasia or continue caring for your old show horse makes you both look like bigger douchebags than Jon Gosselin.
(Isn’t it funny that I compared Herc to a Ferrari in the original blog? Ah, irony! I didn’t know you had an ACTUAL Ferrari that you cared about way more than him!)
Oh, and since I know you will run around saying the horse was crippled and you were just trying to “put him out of his misery,” I’m gonna get some video in a few weeks because we’ve got the darn horse better than 90% sound and we haven’t even given him so much as a joint supplement yet!
Put some clothes on and stop backyard breeding!
Another day, another 12 year old child on a 19 month old stud colt. The saddle is bigger than his back, she doesn’t have a helmet on, riding a 19 month old is flat out idiotic to begin with, and of course he’s in a long shanked mechanical hackamore. That’s a colt breaking bit, right?
The ad:
“all three can go for $1500.00 to same home or trade….. looking for truck/ horce trailer
MOMMA is well built cutting, roaping. trail.good brood mare about a 3 pn scale rides out great my kids can ride her she is about 10 years old .loads well $800.00 obo
TRIGGER Trained on barrels, poles,trails he is a little head shy but rides great little shy on loading he was beat but he is much much better. $ 700.00 obo
COCO is 20-21 months old he is a stud very gental.naural gate beautiful gate at that my 12 year old rides him every other day , he is still learning to neck rane he would make anyone a great prospect for almost any thing $ 1000.00 obo
you can see the kids riding them on the web at cherokeerunranch.com whould be up by now” (Sadly for us, it is not. Your web designer is a slacker, and as a result I don’t have nearly as much material as I suspect exists!). I did google it and thank you, google cache, we can see that shirtless chick below thinks she is a rescue. OF COURSE SHE DOES.
I will say that, although this is a terrible picture of the spectacularly cow-hocked colt, I am totally distracted from the colt by his owner’s lack of clothing. Good Lord, PUT ON A SHIRT! You’re selling a horse, you’re not advertising in the Erotic Services section of Craigslist. And please remove the headstall from that poor colt’s eye. They don’t sell better after you’ve blinded them.
I really am totally baffled at why anyone would do this, on camera or not. Riding in a tiny bikini? So horsehair up your you-know-what is appealing to you? Ewww. I think it’s bad enough when you have to bodyclip a shaggy horse and wind up with more hair on your chest than Ron Jeremy but at least we don’t try to do that deliberately!
Now let’s review everything else that’s wrong here. Momma is a brood mare? Does Momma even have papers? No mention made in the ad. Does the stud colt have papers? Again, nothing. Why in the world is that a stud colt? $10 says it’s either (a) because he’s gray or (b) nobody has $100 to get him gelded. You live in Texas but you can’t spell “horse?” And by the way, a gate is what you connect to your fence.
Again, if you really want to sell horses, put on normal riding-appropriate clothing (i.e. jeans, boots and a full shirt), tack on them that fits and write an ad that actually tells the buyer something (whether or not Momma has papers and her pedigree are extremely important if you are selling her as a broodmare, and does “cutting” mean she has actually competed or she will chase the neighbor’s cow? Ditto for the little guy…people are going to want to know his breeding!). This ad is a total fail as far as selling horses, though I suspect she will succeed at reelin’ in some creepers on the Internet who aren’t too fussy! Eeek, hide the children!
