Tennessee Walking Horse Celebration = 80+ HPA violations

CC-by-SA-2.0 Aut:Just Chaos "Tennessee Walking Horse in halter competition"

The Tennessee Walking Horse Celebration is where anyone who is anyone that shows Tennessee Walkers’, goes to compete for the World Grand Champion. There are many different events and many different awards like the Walking Ponies World Grand Championship, the Walking Mares and Geldings World Grand Championship, the Western Plantation Pleasure Lite Shod World Grand Championship and many others. During these competitions the horses are to strut their stuff and then judges determine if they have what it takes to make the Grand Champion per event.

During these events, some people like to place certain shoes on horses that are called pressure shoeing. This involves cutting the hoof of a horse very close to the quick, then tightly applying a shoe causing pressure and pain to the horse’s feet. When suffering from this the horses will have an unusually high stepping gait to try to softly walk. This is called soring and is against the Horse Protection Act (HPA). The Horse Protection Act was created in 1970 to help eliminate this problem in competitions. The USDA sends inspectors out to look the horses over to ensure no soaring or any signs of misuse are going on. If so, they are given a citation for the violation of the HPA.

In 2007, 127 violations were given out at the Tennessee Walking Horse Celebration and in 2008 there were 187 violations. Not a good trend here. Just on the first night of the 2009 event there were over 80 violations given out. This does not look good for numbers since this was only the first night of an eleven day show. The citations were given to horses that took the top three awards. This is not just someone at the bottom of the ranking; it is also the top winners. The USDA has not released the final numbers yet for the entire show that was from August 26 until September 5th, 2009.

It is often hard to correct this problem within the Tennessee Walking Horse communities due to the judges still score high for the large, high gait the horses have. Therefore, the soring will still continue until higher up with the Tennessee Walking Horse Breeders’ and Exhibitions’ Associations create stiffer rules for their judges for these competitions. Until then we will have to rely on USDA to do their inspections. Others are getting on the no-soring rule, like the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission. They have made sure that all Tennessee Walking Horses be checked by reputable inspectors for soring. The Fund monies are now going to credible organizations to ensure the proper health of these beautiful creatures. Kentucky and Tennessee seem to have the most issues with soring.
 

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