I assume so. Equally odious and easily disprovable, too.
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#NotTheOnion - didn’t even have to exagerate the headline, just the facts are mind blowing
hard to believe sometimes it is just about 2020 and the country is still like this, I thought for sure a few decades ago there would eventually be far more enlightenment
those fat asses couldn’t even just dismount and have one walk him in, they decided to just stay on the horses, not even call for a car, wow just wow
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But then he would no longer be a mounted police officer. Image is important… ironically. /s
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People talking about the training of the horses… Have you had much experience with horses?
You see those boots the cops are wearing? You see the chunky heels on those? You know, one of the classic design elements of cowboy boots? It’s called safety gear, and if you’re smart, it doesn’t matter what horse you are on, you wear it.
Because it doesn’t matter how well the horse is trained, training can fail. That heel is designed to prevent the rider’s foot from slipping through the stirrup, so if they fall, they won’t get dragged. Because even cowboys know that training can fail and horses can behave unpredictably. You don’t know what stimulus will set them off. A horse that can be calm under gunfire might freak out at the sight of an ice-cream cone. They’re heavy leather boots, so if the horse steps on your foot, you might get to keep your foot.
The guy on foot? Look at him: restrained with his arms behind his back and a leash. I doubt he’s wearing boots designed for safety. So, if the horse steps on him (easy enough to happen when you look how close the riders are) he could be seriously injured. If he trips and ends up under the feet of the horse(s), his arms are restrained, so he can’t recover quickly. We’re talking 1000 or more pounds coming down in a small area with no give.
Anyone who has worked seriously with horses knows that you don’t do this. And that’s before you get into the optics of two white men on horses leading a black man down the street. It is either the most spectacular, stunning ignorance that you are only allowed to achieve through massive amounts of white privilege, or more active racism at work.
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In the words of Christian Slater, circa 1994:
SFW?
That means absolutely nothing, and has no relevance on the actions taken on the part of those LEOs.
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Why do I get the feeling there are a couple of Galveston cops scrubbing their social media histories all quick and quiet-like?
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I have seen - with my own eyes - a police horse throw an officer. They may be well trained but they are not infallible. And they don’t necessarily see when someone trips and falls behind them.
Not that it matters - this situation is ridiculous and the officers in question should have walked with the man, on foot.
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Absolutely. And when he looped the rope to the saddle horn and pretended to kick the horse into a gallop, it was just a joke.
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Well, the one thing we can likely all agree on is that he certainly does deserve to be mounted, that’s for sure. In some stocks in a public square, perchance?
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Yeah, and I’m pretty sure they still had to do that, after relocating him to the staging area, because they couldn’t process him there.
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I grew up with horses. We had one that – as I mentioned in another post recently – was the most lazy, laid-back fucker going… right up until he spotted any mammal smaller than a Great Dane, at which point he turned into a murder machine.
You can’t train a horse on all stimuli, and you don’t know how they’ll react until exposed. They are a living, breathing animal.
They are also incredibly empathetic. There is a reason one of the only two officially recognized therapy animals is a horse. If the rider is excited or worked up, the horse will be also. That’s a recipe for disaster.
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That’d only be true if If they weren’t pigs
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Call in a squad car. Just like what motorcycle pigs do.
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Nobody’s ever seen anything like this before…
Jesus F-ing Christ Texas cops… Even if there was some reason that safety couldn’t be maintained while waiting for a patrol car, there are so many better ways of doing this. (like maybe just cuff him, and put him on the horse in front of you, or let the other mounted popo lead a riderless horse, and just walk with the guy…). How absolutely brain dead do you have to be to not get the optics on this one?
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It looks like a horse lead. So yes you are correct.
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I have an EFF “Fight Dystopia” sticker in view at my office. I think about it sometimes- when I got the sticker, it registered as “fight to prevent dystopia”. But now, more often than not, it seems more apt to interpret as “fight our current dystopia”.
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This misses the point of horse training (which, sadly, some horse trainers also miss). It’s folly to try to train a horse to react to all possible stimuli, so good training teaches a horse to trust its handler unconditionally and to respond to specific communication, in a non-context-dependent way, and at various levels of alertness (and typically around a wide variety of stimuli). It’s not rocket science. Police horses do not spook at small mammals, or ice cream cones, or any of the other nonsensical scenarios that people have put forth in this thread to suggest that the horses’ training is the problem here.
As for the safety gear worn by the officers demonstrating the need to protect themselves from the unpredictability of horses, note that they’re not wearing helmets. If you worry about something unexpected going wrong on horseback, a helmet is the first thing you put on – TBIs are extremely common in equestrian falls. I suspect the boots are as much for style as for safety.
That doesn’t make it right though, or without risk. Things more likely than a failure of training in the horses: horse simply tripping on uneven pavement and falling; failure of training in human officer; person in custody simply tripping on uneven pavement and falling… and so on.
Source: decades of working as a horse trainer, including training therapy horses for physically disabled riders, and having many, many safe and controlled horseback encounters with novel and potentially threatening stimuli (e.g. wildfire, helicopter utility line maintenance, student film sci-fi battle scene staging on public trail, stepping in yellowjacket nest).
Failure to wear all PPE doesn’t mean that it’s a bright idea.
Congratulations on never seeing a training failure. Unfortunately, not every trainer – even those working for a police department – is going to have such a perfect record. Training, whether in humans or horses can fail.
I also noted the problems with accidents. There are a great many things that can go horrifically wrong here. The one that did, was that two white men on horses decided to put a black man in restraints, attach a rope, and parade him down the street. Again, that is either the most ignorant of white privilege, or downright active racism.
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I think we all agree about that. But some of the comments about horse training miss the forest of poor judgment for the trees.
Once you start talking about accidents happening, you might as well say that people shouldn’t be put in the back seats of police cars because brakes sometimes fail, and other drivers sometimes cause collisions, and so on.
This is about horrific judgment more generally, not about horses.
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I broke my right arm at the age of seven because my younger brother messed with the hind legs of the horse I was on. And yes I know that these horses are supposed to be well trained, it does make sense to stay away from their landing gear.
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