Ann Romney's nanny: "It's true that Ann Romney never worked a day in her life."

[magical thyme]

18. tiny nit

She rides European warmbloods (the couple I'm aware of are German Oldenburgs).

But it still is annoying to someone with a lifelong passion for dressage and horses. So she took up riding as therapy and gets to work with a top trainer. Big whoop. She probably never mucked a stall in her life. My sisters and I mucked stalls for the privilege of riding other people's horses, as did many, many a young rider out there.

It's easy to love riding expensive, fully trained schoolmasters with perfect temperaments and a lifetime of perfect care, that are already trained to the top levels, while being coached by top trainers. The top trainers *used* to be available to all of us, back when nobody in the US had heard of dressage. My first riding teacher went on to become an olympic coach. But once the 1%ers took over, they priced everything out of reach of us "ordinary" people who don't deserve horses (yes, I had a high class hooker to a 1%er tell me that people worked all day didn't deserve to own horses!).

It's not so easy to rescue abused horses, rehab them, and train them to FEI levels yourself. Feeding, grooming, mucking out every day. Getting up at 5 am to feed and muck before you go to work. Getting home, changing your clothes and starting all over.

And still love them.

My rescue gelding freaked out and flipped over backwards. I was able to jump free, but he rolled over me before I could crawl away. The ER doctor noted I had bitten my tongue (the edges turned purple/black and it doubled in size by the next morning). He missed the fracture where my clavicle meets the sternum and the badly sprained knee. After a sleepless night, I was up at 5 the next morning, and at work by 8:30 to attend the important meeting at work.

It wasn't his fault. It wasn't my fault. I still loved my boy enough to eventually move to Maine so I could afford enough land, and to build him a barn in my own back yard *with my own hands* so he could spend his last 8 years in retirement.

Yes, I feel resentment and bitterness over 1%ers expressing their "love" for their horses. They don't do the hard work -- any of it. They just take all the rewards, and leave their castoffs and fuck ups for the rest of us to fix.