One a day, plus iron

When I first read of the fugly horse site, through this site, I didn't really get it. I do now. While making fun of the odd ugly/unusual horse with some snarky commentary is kind of fun in a "glad it's not my horse" sort of way and along with learning about horse conformation/safety/training, the point of the site seems to also include the following message:

"Don't be a 'horse breeder' unless you have the expertise, time, and effort available to do it correctly." The people breeding these things seem generally to fall into the same category of people who breed dogs for money. They are essentially trying to use the uteri and semen of their livestock to make anything they can that they can then pimp/lie/foist onto the public as an allegedly worthwhile horse.

They evidently sell to the clueless (which would include me, if I were to buy a horse on my own). There are parents in this world to Veruca Salt-like children ("Daddy! I want a pony!) who go to some of these breeders to buy horses for their kids. The parents, like me, do not know a good horse from a bad horse. The unscrupulous breeder waves around (for instance) some AWS 'papers' (and I use the term loosely now) and shows the parent a horse. Parent buys horse. Horse then develops health issues since the stud and the brood mare both had problems and should never have been bred. Horse then gets used for a bit and turned into dogfood or steak for the French when the health problems can't be fixed economically. Temperament is another issue altogether.

The site also provides a wealth of "stupid owner" tricks. Some of the better, more recent examples include a picture of an owner letting a foal jump up on him with the foal nipping at his T-shirt, people making foals jump over big stuff, and kids lying down napping with the new foal. Nothing like letting a foal think it can jump on a person. Cute now, deadly later.

The site also sheds light on "bad owner" people who simply do not care for their horses, with issues from not feeding to feeding too much to "rescuing" horses, only to put them into situations just as bad as those from which they were rescued to people threatening to sell horses to the meat men in order to jerk someone's heartstrings to pay for them, etc.

In a nutshell, it is an educational, effective site dealing with unscrupulous breeding and overbreeding. You can't exactly spay horses economically, I suspect, but if this were a dog site, I'd say it's an effective consumer education/spay/neuter site with witty commentary.