Equine Advocates President Susan Wagner was interviewed for a Guardian article questioning if equestrian sports should be removed from the Olympics. The discussion topic comes out of the controversy surrounding a video of dressage champion Charlotte Dujardin whipping a horse.
Here is a section of the article where Susan is quoted:
Fuelling the debate are emotive and deep-seated questions about what, in these enlightened times, humans owe animals. Horses were domesticated about 3500BC, and have since been used for war, work, transportation, sport and companionship.
But while “there is a surfeit of information” on humans’ deep feeling for horses, as one 2021 study put it, “it remains elusive for us to truly know what a horse thinks or feels” – not least about us.
“When horses are bonded with a human, I think in many cases they enjoy having that kind relationship,” says Susan Wagner, the founder of Equine Advocates, a New York-based organisation that rescues horses (mostly from the meat trade) and educates about equine abuse.
But coercion, cruelty and abuse are rife among all working animals used to produce profit, Wagner says; the Olympics are just more visible, and higher stakes. “Whenever there’s a lot of money or glory involved, people do things to animals because they want them to perform a certain way.”