Do Connemara members approve of their dues paying for bullying?

Presidential candidates spent $6 billion campaigning for the 2012 election.

Perhaps $6 billion isn’t what it used to be, but that amount of money could have paid for a lot of progress.

Instead, the $6 billion was spent trying to tear down people. In essence, it was spent on bullying.

The money spent on Connemara inspections is also spent on bullying.

No matter how pure the motives of inspectors, the whole point of an inspections process is to weed out animals.

Weeding out anything is a form of bullying. It’s saying that someone or something doesn’t have a right to exist or take part in certain activities, when in fact that person or thing has just as much right as anyone else.

So, the American Connemara society pays for the expenses of people who have been deemed inspectors to travel to cities to bully horses.

I suspect that, when Connemara members pay their dues each year to the society, they expect those dues to go toward progress.

It’s reasonable to conclude that members would define progress as creating a bigger and more positive breed society that encourages people to breed horses and that fosters good training and showing so those horses go out into the world and do well, ensuring that the Connemara is around for generations to come.

I was thumbing through my ACPS membership book recently (the 2011 edition), and I noticed that it seemed thinner than it had been in 2005, the last year I really studied it, though the font and letter size appeared to be similar for the names. A quick and unofficial count of the pages listing members’ names suggested that the membership had dropped by four pages from 2005 to 2011. And the pages of people who remained members were full of people like my dad and former veterinarian, who are life members but not actively involved, so they prop up the numbers.

I realize there is a recession going on, and one could expect the membership of any organization to drop.

In fact, I would think it was incumbent on every organization to implement a strategy to try to grow its ranks, preventing a further drop in membership and dues as the economy continues to drag.

Instead, this Connemara organization has spent what I suspect is a considerable amount of money holding inspections, or bullying sessions, and being divisive by telling some ponies they aren’t good enough.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but would this not make the numbers drop even more?

Far from progress, this is a return to the past. It’s discrimination, eugenics, dictatorship, witch hunts and scarlet letters all rolled into one, and, what those all come down to is bullying.

The American Connemara society wasn’t a big organization in 2005. If I recall, it had about 750 US members. A drop in four pages could cut that number by 100 members or so.

So instead of using members’ hard-earned money to create new programs and incentives to make people feel welcome and to promote the breed at a time when there’s less interest in horses, the society has used members’ money to drive members away.

At the end of the day, what is left: Lots of bullies, few members and no progress.