Five reasons to eliminate Connemara inspections

Here are five obvious reasons why the American Connemara Pony Society should eliminate inspections:

1) This is your chance to decide how history will judge you.

Eliminating inspections is the right thing to do.

2) Survival.

It’s the only way to keep the doors open.

Discrimination is offensive to millennials, those born from 1981 to 1996 (ages 22 to 37, as of 2018), who were set to overtake baby boomers as the largest population in 2019, according to The Washington Post.

Boomers — older boomers — currently run the Connemara society. They have made discrimination their top priority, holding inspections across the country several times each year to shun refined Connemaras.

These boomers have spent thousands of dollars in ACPS funds on their inspections while other Connemara activities have disappeared and lifetime society members have been asked to start paying dues again due to a shortage of money.

The refined Connemaras are genetically Connemaras, living in America, a country whose founding was based on freedom and equality. We are not Ireland. We left Ireland, remember?

Boomers, who numbered 74.1 million in 2016, will fall to 16.6 million by mid-century. There will be no bigots to sit around and gloat about how the breed has remained “pure” according to their definition.

The median age of horse owners in 2016 was 38, according to the American Horse Council’s 2018 report on the state of the horse industry.

The Washington Post in March 2018 said the millennial generation abhors racism and protectionism and embraces openness and inclusion.

And the post-millennials who follow millennials are “millennials on steroids,” according to Business Insider, which said in December 2017 that the latest generation is the most diverse and inclusive yet.

Connemara inspections are nothing more than bullying, a way to keep out horse breeders whose refined, athletic horses beat the more clunky horses bred by some ACPS officials in the 1980s and 1990s. The clunky horses had been bred to fit a made-up description of “a perfect white, rugged Connemara,” yet they were not bred to compete and it became obvious when they couldn’t.

3) U.S. horse numbers are dropping.

There once was room in the world for both types of horses, athletic and clunky, but resources have dwindled for horses as lawn ornaments since the Great Recession.

The United States lost 1.98 million horses from 2004 to 2016, according to the American Horse Council, with the total dropping to 7.25 million from 9.22 million.

Reasons for the drop include a “decline in breed registration trends,” the AHC says.

Thirteen American horse registries saw their horse registrations fall to about 151,000 in 2012 from a peak of nearly 328,000 in 2002, according to Debbie Fuentes, registrar of the Arabian Horse Association, who tracks data from those 13 registries each year and whose numbers were cited by thehorse.com in a report in 2015. Fuentes does not track Connemara data.

Human membership numbers in those 13 breeds fell across the board in 2014, Fuentes said.

The total number of Connemaras in the United States in 2018 is not a published number. I suspect the American Connemara Pony Society doesn’t know the total itself. Classified ads on the ACPS website are few, and the membership directory is much thinner than in 2005, when there were more than 700 members; many of those 700 were life members who no longer participated in Connemara activities.

The ACPS invited Denny Emerson to its annual meeting in September 2017 to talk about how to save the Connemara breed in America. He republished his comments on Facebook after his talk. None of his suggestions seems to have been adopted, as of September 2018.

4) Connemara societies currently promote a color that carries cancer risks.

Connemara inspections don’t specifically require horses to be white or gray. But many U.S. owners wrote to me in 2005 to say that they were sure white horses were preferred by ACPS officials.

The website of Ireland’s Connemara Pony Breed Society rotates through six photos of featured Connemaras, and the ponies are all a shade of gray. America’s ACPS has gone to great lengths to say its horse discrimination in the form of inspections is designed to mirror that of Ireland. While the ACPS website features horses and ponies of all colors, the digital diversity doesn’t reflect the reality: White rules.

UC Davis veterinarians said in 2008 that about 70 percent of white horses develop melanoma, and all melanomas are malignant.
At the time, the university, a leader in melanoma research, said the occurrence of tumors in white horses had been increasing and sun exposure was a major contributor.

In 2023, the two main researchers working on a study of melanoma in Connemaras offered a slightly different message, saying that 80 percent of “graying” horses (horses born dark that turned lighter) developed melanoma, and equine melanoma was different than human melanoma and not affected by UV rays. One of those researchers did say that environmental factors may be involved. And one noted that the Lipizzaner breeders were trying to get away from white horses.

I believe the Davis researchers’ words on whether UV exposure matters, but the absolute worst case of melanoma I ever saw was in an Oak Hills Connemara pony named Heather at age 30 in Phoenix, Arizona. She was just covered in bumps and looked like she had a permanent case of half golf ball size hives. If UV rays weren’t involved, I’m going to suggest related environmental factors were.

Are those bumps uncomfortable? My old Connemara gelding with melanoma tumors here and there (several on his legs, some under his tail, one inside his sheath) does not like me to push on them, so I’m going with yes.

Scientists tell us the future holds more sun exposure and related environmental changes, not less.

Connemara societies worldwide, led by Ireland’s society, are promoting graying ponies predisposed to melanoma.

5) America is better than this.

Two former presidents from different sides of the aisle called for a better nation at the funeral of the late Sen. John McCain on Sept. 1, 2018.

President Barack Obama said: “John understood, as JFK understood, as Ronald Reagan understood, that part of what makes our country great is that our membership is based not on our blood line, not on what we look like, what our last names are, not based on where our parents or grandparents came from or how recently they arrived, but on adherence to a common creed that all of us are created equal, endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights. “

Obama also said: I never saw John treat anyone differently because of their race or religion or gender … He considered it the imperative of every citizen who loves this country to treat all people fairly.”

President George W. Bush said McCain “loved freedom with a passion of a man who knew its absence. He respected the dignity inherent in every life, a dignity that does not stop at borders and cannot be erased by dictators. Perhaps above all John detested the abuse of power and could not abide bigots and swaggering despots; there was something deep inside of him that made him stand up for the little guy, to speak for forgotten people, in forgotten places.”