Bad ‘approved’ Connemaras are not an accident

By now you’re asking: Who cares whether the American Connemara Pony Society has inspections?

Who cares if inspections are designed to get rid of any trace of Thoroughbred Little Heaven’s appearance in his offspring?

I’m all about motive.

The motive behind inspections was malicious, which should make Connemara owners want to pay attention, but the results destroyed the society, and that has affected everyone.

The inspections were born out of one woman’s seeming hatred and jealousy.

I believe one of the most influential officials in ACPS history used her hatred and jealousy of my parent’s stallion, a grandson of Thoroughbred Little Heaven, to alter the course of the Connemara in America forever.

I believe she created the inspections program to give her horses a place where they could be relevant when my parents’ horses and other offspring of Little Heaven were winning big in the open show world and her horses were not.

It’s not an accident that ACPS inspections require Connemaras to do nothing.

I believe the inspections program that she shaped allowed the US to be infiltrated with bad Connemaras.

The current list of ACPS-approved Connemaras in America includes many bad ponies, some dangerous, in my opinion. The list also contains some nice ponies, but there’s no way for someone to trust the list, given the bad ones.

This ACPS official’s anger boiled up quickly when my parents bought their stallion as a colt from Lynfields Farm in Vermont in 1975. I was 12. He was black, sleek, and perfectly built from head to toe. He grew up to be the most fun Connemara I have ever ridden, and that’s from someone who has started hundreds of Connemaras for breeders in many states and knows the best and worst of a lot of different bloodlines.

My parents’ stallion was supremely athletic and so eager to compete. He could fly around a challenging cross country course and make all the needed adjustments.

I am now 57.

For 45 years, FORTY-FIVE YEARS, I have listened to this one longtime ACPS official and inspector — and, by extension, those she influenced — try to rain on my family’s Connemara parade.

This ACPS official hated the appearance of our stallion, even as a youngster.

She insulted him as not the right type of Connemara that should be bred and questioned my parents’ judgment as breeders.

And she fumed publicly that the open hunter/jumper judges at the St. Louis National Charity Horse Show in the late 1970s and early 1980s — top national judges brought in for a highly prestigious show — knew nothing about good Connemara conformation (her version) when our stallion beat her horses multiple times for the Connemara conformation championship.

My parents were so excited about their great pony, and SHE COULD NOT STAND IT.

She appeared to wait to push through inspections that would approve only coarse ponies until after the early deaths of the two biggest opponents of inspections, Jackie Harris of the famed Hideaway Farm (home of Little Heaven descendant and champion eventer Hideaway’s Erin Go Bragh), and Joan McKenna Sr. (my mom) of Kerrymor Farm (home of two wonderful Little Heaven grandchildren). Jackie Harris made an appeal in the American Connemara magazine begging for no inspections. The current magazine editorial policy prevents any negative comments about inspections.

By 1975, my parents went to Lynfields Farm to look for new bloodlines because they had gotten wiser about the danger of buying a Connemara without assessing its ability to perform. They wanted their 12-year-old daughter to go around a hunter course without being dumped on her head. They specifically went to Lynfields Farm to seek out an honest jumping pony for their child because they were scared, and the Lynfields ponies had a great reputation, being that they descended from Little Heaven.

Their daughter had spent the previous years on a Connemara mare that routinely cantered up to a fence and slammed on the brakes. This often sent their daughter flying over the mare’s head onto the fence or the ground on the other side (I could post video, if necessary, but I’d rather not do that to this mare). It’s the same accident that paralyzed Christopher Reeve.

And where did that stopper mare come from? From the ACPS official who created the inspections program.

The mare was actually more willing to work than many Connemaras that would emerge from that farm later: The later ponies didn’t want to trot or canter, much less jump. I defended the mare for years and kept trying (she was my first horse), but I knew making her want to jump was a lost cause. I was always forcing her to do it and waiting to see when she would balk and slam on the brakes. If I have learned anything in decades of riding, it is don’t waste your time forcing a horse to do something. Find one that is eager to do it.

This ACPS official was breeding for the coarse type pony. She didn’t appear to be breeding a fast horse to a slow horse, as breeders usually do in aiming for the perfect horse. She often bred a slow horse to a slow horse or a slow horse to an unrideable horse in her pursuit of a certain coarse look.

This ACPS official started belittling my parents as soon as they returned with their broodmare and stallion prospect from Lynfields Farm. I can remember my parents’ disappointment over her comments. Those ponies were the fabulous Round Robin’s Easter Bonnet — who by age 12 had competed many years in Pony Club at the B level and produced seven foals for Lynfields Farm with another on the way — plus the colt by her side, Lynfields Kiltuck.

This ACPS official seemed angry that my parents turned to other lines for their breeding stock when they decided to start a breeding farm. Apparently, this ACPS official didn’t share their concern for their daughter’s safety.

Both Lynfields Farm ponies were honest jumping machines and became open hunter, dressage, and eventing champions for Kerrymor Farm many times over. Robin competed into her 30s in eventing and pony hunter classes (even after having eight foals and competing in Pony Club in her youth!). She died at 36. Kiltuck died at 31.

The offspring of those two horses won national and Connemara performance awards across all disciplines, including Kerrymor’s Autumn Hope winning the top USEF Connemara award — the Clifden Trophy — three times.

Over time, this ACPS official seemed to me to become even more sour in general, whether it was anger at her own life or disgust at the success of others, including other Connemara bloodlines. And she took that meanness out on targets without the resources to hit back.

Why does it matter? Again, everything relevant to inspections was driven by what was going on in this ACPS official’s head.

The ACPS official’s former farm caretaker of more than 20 years read me a letter fairly recently that her adult daughter had written to apply to a prestigious law school. The letter said the daughter wanted to go to law school to be a champion for poor people because she had grown up poor and watched her mother and the rest of her family treated so cruelly by this ACPS official that the girl was deeply scarred by it emotionally. She wanted to dedicate her life to helping those similarly downtrodden. She did get accepted into the law school. There’s no way I can capture here the sadness in that letter. Maybe one day she’ll post it online.

I can attest to the fact that this family was treated very poorly routinely. Examples? Beyond the regular belittling along the lines of “Can’t you do anything right?” this ACPS official gave the caretaker a small, two-story house to live in, just as she had the previous caretaker. And then the ACPS official started randomly taking away rooms or whole floors so she could store junk there or give her boyfriend an office, despite him never appearing to work. To me, it appeared as if she was just messing with this family. She never did this to the previous caretaker, who was not poor. All of this ACPS official’s barn employees walked on eggshells. Blowups were common, and the employees were excited when she left town.

In early 2005, I conducted a detailed paper survey of the more than 750 ACPS members to gauge how they felt about inspections, something the ACPS should have done exhaustively before instituting them. My veterinarian, who was familiar with this ACPS official and her views on Connemaras, asked me if I was “afraid of being stoned to death” when I headed to a Connemara show hosted by this ACPS official that summer.

My dad had already asked me if I was afraid this ACPS official would kill me.

“Yes,” I answered him honestly.

Remember here that all I did was conduct a paper survey, doing all the work and paying for the mail costs myself.

I thought there was nothing she wouldn’t do to preserve her inspections born out of vengeance.

When people who know you well — not people who see you three days a year, but people who really know you well — think you’re capable of killing someone over a survey on ACPS inspections or use you as an example of the embodiment of cruelty in a college application, maybe it’s time to do some soul searching and make reparations before time runs out.

I have no hope that will happen. It would take a really big person to admit publicly that she started Connemara inspections for revenge, that she created an atmosphere of bigotry and hatred within the ACPS that decimated the organization, that inspections were fostering the creation of bad approved Connemaras, and that it was time to right the ship by removing the bigotry-fueled inspections and returning the ACPS to its former glory of the 1970s before it collapsed completely.

She is not a big person, in my opinion.

This ACPS official appears to believe in a caste system where the wealthy are much more important than the poor and where white coarse Connemaras are much more important than black refined ones. Those at the bottom of her perceived ladder are to be stepped on or over.

When I bought 10 acres of land in 1995 to build my farm and was so excited about my purchase, this ACPS official waved her hand around her farm and said to me, completely unprovoked, “Ten acres is NOTHING. NOTHING!” showing me that my 10 acres was a pitiful tiny fraction of her family’s large holdings.

Why was I at her farm?

When I moved my parents’ stallion back to my hometown from Arizona in the fall of 1994 after my mom’s sudden death, this ACPS official agreed to keep him and his halfbred daughter at her farm in exchange for me training her ponies and doing other barn chores.

I actually thought we were putting this longtime feud behind us. I eventually moved my horses to my new farm in 1997, but I continued to train horses for her through the early 2000s.

She was laying the foundation for inspections designed to get rid of Connemaras that looked like our stallion while I was training horses for her at her barn. That takes a special kind of deviousness, in my opinion. And, once inspections were in place, she couldn’t wait to tell me that she had failed a stallion that looked just like ours.

Two incidents stand out from those years when I trained her increasingly dead-sided ponies.

The first is a story that the head of ACPS inspections used to love to tell at Connemara events when she saw me because she watched it happen. Around 2000, give or take a few years, the ACPS official who is the subject of this post was taking some sale photos of a young stallion (at least 3, maybe older). He was in a ring on a lunge line. I was asked to sit on his back to demonstrate his size in the photos. I knew he was really stubborn and balked when he was asked to go forward because I had spent several months training him in that ring. It was always stressful to work with him. He would just shut down, like a car dying, and seemed inclined to do something bad if pressed to keep moving. But I was very surprised when this ACPS official asked him to move forward a little on the lunge line during the photo shoot and he erupted and bucked me straight up in the air. It felt like I flew 20 feet. Witnesses say higher. It might have been only 10 feet. I landed behind the saddle, and he threw me up in the air again. The second time, I landed in the sand. Why was I surprised? It’s hard to imagine a stallion that dead-sided having that much buck. But, alas, he had been saying for a long time he had no intention of working. He also appeared very dangerous to clip. Yet, he ticked all the boxes on the inspection sheet for being a coarse, thick-boned pony. That stallion is now an ACPS-approved stallion.

The other story is a mare that I worked with for two years. Her dam had had medical issues while she was in utero, so I granted her some lenience, but I shouldn’t have bothered training her at all. She descended from a Connemara mare nicknamed “the rogue,” I believe, who was unrideable. The first thing the young mare did when I started her on the lunge line was scoop sand in her mouth. That happened over many sessions. And of course I couldn’t let her scoop sand in her mouth. She didn’t like to go faster than a walk, so it was hard to keep her from putting her mouth in the sand. Eventually, and we’re talking months later, I got on and got her to walk and trot under saddle, but I knew to stay away from cantering. She, too, had rash reactions to normal requests. The first day I picked up one of her back feet, she did it willingly. She second day, she kicked me so hard, I had a hoof print on my leg for weeks. After I was riding her, I was working her one day in the ring, and the owner, this ACPS official, asked me how she was doing. I gave an update. The ACPS official wanted to see what she would do if I just let her pick up a canter on the corner from a trot. I let her canter, and she promptly bucked me off. Yes, shame on me for doing it. The owner tried to give her away once to an elderly woman, I was told. The mare came back quickly after a particularly bad experience for the elderly woman. And, yes, you guessed it, the mare is an ACPS-approved Connemara mare. Every time I see the list of approved Connemaras, I wonder what poor breeder wound up with her genes.

And it’s not that these horses did one or two bad things. It’s that caution on my part prevented them from doing bad things for a long time. The second I let my guard down, they seized that opportunity to hurt me.

The hypocrisy by this ACPS official and others is palpable:

– Getting rid of good performance Connemaras while breeding unrideable and unsafe ones.

– Insisting on inspections based on appearance so unrideable and unsafe ponies can pass inspections.

– Pointing to our family’s fabulous horses as flawed!

Our horses loved to go forward, compete, jump, gallop, do dressage, you name it! They were always game.

For 45 years, I have been bullied by this ACPS official, by ACPS Connemara inspections designed to eliminate ponies that look like our stallion, by this ACPS official’s friends (former friends of my parents) who have adopted the same bullying language, and by a Connemara society that has failed me, my late parents, and our horses COMPLETELY.

So imagine my rage in 2020, when I unearthed two old publications from Ireland that showed me that every word on Connemara “type” and coarseness that this ACPS official bullied my family with was a complete LIE.

These books are the personal writings of Michael J. O’Malley, credited with saving the Connemara in the early 1900s and starting the Connemara Pony Breeders Society in Ireland; and a book on the performance Connemara by Irish Connemara breeder and author Nicholas O’Hare that goes into specific detail on the secret recipe that created the quality Connemara: Thoroughbred bloodlines allowed into the breed, especially Little Heaven.

These two breeders weren’t saving coarse Connemaras. They were saving fun, useful Connemaras. Very different things.

You can’t credit O’Malley for saving the Connemara and then define the Connemara as something else, something in fact that O’Malley said he did not want.

The Connemara that O’Malley described as the one he wanted to save was a perfect match to our stallion; O’Malley wanted to preserve the eager Connemara spirit, and he pointed to a refined black Connemara mare as an example of the best of the old type (late 1800s) Connemara breed. And the Connemara that O’Hare was trying to get the Connemara Pony Breeders Society to breed was our stallion, as well — one that could compete and win in the open show world, rather than one based on a coarse appearance that he said had no riding value.

The American Connemara Pony Society’s inspections are designed to do nothing more than discriminate based on a lie of what a Connemara should be.

This ACPS official talked fellow American officials into promoting the lie.

I believe anyone who participates in inspections is an accomplice in the bullying that my family has had to take for 45 years.

The ACPS owes my late parents a public apology for seeming to blindly following this official in her quest to get rid of my parents’ ponies and Connemaras with similar looks, but that will never materialize, either.

So here is what I am going to do.

I intend to stop spending a lot of time on this website. The thousands of hours of quality research on this site has fallen on deaf ears.

I am a journalist, web designer, and SEO specialist, and I plan to spend the rest of my life building the greatest virtual shrine to Thoroughbred Little Heaven that any horse could hope for. I will make sure that this wonderful stallion from the 1940s is the easiest sire of Connemaras one can find on the internet, not to mention the most praised.

The fact that the ACPS treated him like a relative needing to be hidden, despite the fact that he produced some of the greatest Connemaras ever, will be a main theme.

Millennials and the generations that follow will know the equine version of hatred that runs through the main activity of the ACPS: ACPS Connemara inspections.

The days of these lies are over.

I will not pretend that all approved Connemaras are good Connemaras; some are dangerous, in my opinion.

I will not be silenced.

I will continue to call out bullying every time I see or experience it in the Connemara world and elsewhere.

And Little Heaven will stand tall for the ages.

Joanie McKenna Jr., Kerrymor Farm, home of stallion Lynfields Kiltuck, the most beautiful Connemara ever.

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If you’re wondering about those Connemara inspections survey results from 2005, 50 percent of respondents said they didn’t want the inspections that were instituted (there were 89 responses out of 757 surveys sent, which is a great response rate). And ACPS membership dropped nearly 30 percent from 2005 to 2018. I believe those two data points are related.