Walking horse trainers, owners receive warning
USDA says industry needs to do its own policing
Chester Gipson, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s deputy administrator for animal care in the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, told a group of trainers and owners Monday that they need to police their industry or the department will.
“If we find someone pressureshoeing horses, I will do all I can to get them (owners and trainers) banned for life” from the industry shows, Dr. Gipson said.
Pressure shoeing is the practice of clipping a horse’s hooves
to the quick and inappropriately using horseshoes and pads to force the animal’s stride to be balanced on the tip of its front hoof. It is a form of soring, or purposely injuring a horse’s legs to induce a particular gait.
The USDA regulators’ “listening session” Monday in Chattanooga drew about 70 people concerned about the future of the Walking Horse National Celebration in Shelbyville, Tenn., which went without a champion this year for the first time in the competition’s 68-year history.
Friction was clear in the sometimes standing-room-only fifth-floor conference room in downtown Chattanooga’s Volunteer Building as members of the audience traded comments.
Mack Motes, a board member of the Walking Horse Trainers’ Association, suggested the agriculture department is unclear about what is evidence of training abuses and is not recognizing improvements in the industry.
The industry has had a 50 percent improvement in the number of horses disqualified for alleged abuses this year over last year’s Celebration, but the department unfairly waited until the Celebration’s championship show to inspect, he said.
“Some 2,992 horses showed this year in the National Celebration, and 10 were allegedly in violation of the soring rule,” Mr. Motes said. “We’re always talking about those turned down (in violation), but not about the more than 2,000 that were OK.”
But owner and trainer Lucille Davis said abuse is occurring regularly, and some show judges have told her “how to fix the scars.” She also said some have told her there are at least four ways to pressure shoe a horse without being found out.
“It was common knowledge, and everybody knew it but us,” she said.
Ms. Davis said “we’ve improved” as an industry in the
time since the Horse Protection Act was amended to include rules for walking horses. But, she asked, “are we solving the problem or just shifting things around?”
She suggested USDA should receive more funding and inspect all the horses in the barns of people whose horses were disqualified recently.
Some of her suggestions were laughed at by others in the audience, but another owner, breeder and exhibitioner, Nancy Fincher from Pell City, Ala., agreed with Ms. Davis.
“The walking horse industry is in a period of change that is desperately needed,” she told Mr. Gipson. “And don’t think the industry wants to change, or we wouldn’t be here 26 years later still talking about this.”
Several owners and trainers at the meeting said Chattanoogan and Hamilton County Election Commissioner Mike Walden was not present at the meeting.
Mr. Walden’s championshipfavorite horse was disqualified by federal inspectors at the Tennessee Walking Horse National Celebration, and he later was accused of trying to pay the trainers of the remaining qualifying horses not to show.
Mr. Walden, who has not returned Chattanooga Times Free Press phone messages, said in an apology posted later on the Internet that his offer was misunderstood.
“I made that offer because I was led to believe by several trainers they did not want to show, not to stop them from showing,” he wrote.
Mr. Walden has been suspended
from Celebration walking horse shows and corporate sponsorships for two years.
Dr. Gipson told the group the USDA is not backing away from the walking horse issue, despite “a great deal of misinformation out there” about interest last week from U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn.
The Associated Press reported Monday that Sen. Frist, is weighing in on the Tennessee walking horse controversy by asking USDA to consider an industry-backed change in the law.
In a Thursday letter to U.S. Department of Agriculture Undersecretary Bruce Knight, Sen. Frist and U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., say they want to clarify what constitutes soring so regulators can enforce the Horse Protection Act “in a more consistent manner.”
“It has been asserted that the current definition of soring ... is interpreted and applied differently across the country,” the letter states.
Matt Lehigh, a spokesman for Sen. Frist, said the walking horse’s “long history in Tennessee and its sizable economic impact on our state make the consistent enforcement of these regulations important to the senator.”