Okay, I'm pissed off.

My kid Margaret was riding my horse today, cooling him down after a good day's work. She didn't have her feet in the stirrups, because she was (quite reasonably) expecting a nice, quiet few laps of the arena at a lazy walk. Then the assholes in the exercise pen (round yard) next to the arena started cracking a whip at their own poor, confused horse, who had no idea what they wanted, so of course they kept cracking the whip.

My horse took off in a panic, which is very unlike him, so you know he must have been really, really scared. Margaret — still riding without stirrups, mind you — tried her best to stop him, but he's strong as a ox and really determined, and she's only twelve. As she pulled on the reins, he just got furious and frustrated as well as scared, and started bucking. She stuck on him for several agonizing seconds, still keeping her head and doing her best to stop him, before finally falling when she noticed a patch of soft sand where she could land safely. I checked that she was okay, then went to calm my horse down (thanks to anyone reading this who happened to participate in keeping him from heading for the hills).

Once things were back under control, Houston went to yell at the assholes. Then one of our friends went to yell at the assholes. Then Margaret and I went to yell at the assholes. They had apparently said to our friend, "Is it our fault if someone else's horse goes off?"

!!!

She enlightened them that everyone's safety is everyone's highest priority, so by the time Margaret and I got there, they had started to get a clue. "This is the kid who fell off because you were cracking that whip," I snarled as we approached. "This is the kid who has a head injury, an arm injury, and a hip injury because you were cracking the whip." They had a thousand reasons why it supposedly wasn't their fault, including that one of the ranch owners had told them to do it this way. "With other horses around?" I asked incredulously. "Yes," said one of them defensively. "And she was heaps louder than we were. I didn't think we were making any noise."

!!!

I later checked with the person who supposedly told them to do it that way — "Yeah, but when I showed them, there were no other horses around," she said. Defensively. (And either way, I can't really see that whatever they were doing could possibly have had any relationship at all to what this person would have showed them. All they were doing was stressing their horse out and scaring every other horse within range. And the range was considerable.)

"You may need to say things more clearly," I said to the person as calmly as I could, "because you really can't assume that it's going to occur to people like that to be careful about other horses."

Moreover, our friend went and talked to the other owners as well. So I think words will be said all around. I can only hope I never see the assholes again. But I probably will, because it's not that big a property. It's too much to hope that they will, out of humiliation, find somewhere else to torment their own and others' horses.