Horsing Around

There's been a lot of hoopla about horses and Romania lately. Let's summarize it.

Back in 2007, we learned that Romania booted horses off its congested roads because, apparently, they were “responsible” for over 10% of automobile accidents. Then, only a few short weeks ago, a horse meat as beef fraud scandal commenced in Europe, exposing the complexities of food processing and security as well as the British propensity to look down on the “savages” who ate the healthier but unusual horsemeat.

Then, the gif above.

Here’s a sample of the comments made by “redditors”.

• "Horses have heavy bodies supported by pretty small, fragile legs in comparison. The bones and tendons in their lower legs are very susceptible to injury because of this. Running them full out on tarmac like that puts an unreasonable amount of strain on those bones and tendons. More likely than not, these horses ended up with injuries unless the owners had been slowly adding this type of work into the horses' exercise routines. In addition, horses feet are not designed to withstand this type of surface. Even with protective shoes, galloping on hard surfaces can cause splitting and bruising in the hooves which is extremely painful for the animal." mam1892
• This is in Romania. These, though, are Irish gypsies horse racing not caring about police intervention. [Video] and this is another between Irish Traveller Horse Race ''Lazy Davy'' vs. Big Joe Joyces ''Paddy'' dan90one "better vid liveleak" Valman
• "I hate anything that brings out the Hitler in me... but whenever i see gypsies do this sort of stuff i go full third Reich" HymirTheDarkOne
• "Gypsies gonna gyp?" - Akanderson87, greycubed
• "I've traveled throughout Romania on sales trips - there are horses and carts everywhere. OK, maybe not in the center of Bucharest, but everywhere else you will see them a couple of times a day. They haul everything from wood to recycled plastic to whatever is growing in season to rubber tires... They are the life and blood of the families that own them. What is different about this video, though, is that they are in MUCH smaller carts than you normally see. These two carts wouldn't haul much, so these make me think they are made to go fast and just carry people. As such, these horses are probably not fearing for their lives because they probably run full-out fairly often, but it probably is wreaking havoc on their hooves. Lastly, Roma are known for just fuckin' with you sometimes. We got redirected to a completely different town because there was a soccer game going on around the bend from the intersection. They just put a road-block sign up for grins. Took us 45 minutes of backtracking to figure it out. We turned down the road and there were a whole group of them just laughing at all of the cars they re-routed. So these guys in the video could well just be fuckin' with people to slow down traffic and having a laugh and a race. The police won't do anything unless they really start to back traffic up." vpohode
• "To everyone saying this is bad for the horse, you don't know shit about horses. Im 21 and have lived with and ridden horses since I was a toddler. Horses that have been handled on pavement and trained on it can run on it fine. I have a 26 year old gelding that can still run on pavement and has since my mom got him 22 years ago. The only thing that you have to watch out for when cantering a horse on pavement is "handling", their hooves can slip on pavement easily. In this situation, these horses probably do this pretty often, so they are conditioned to running on a hard surface. In addition to this, they make special horseshoes with rubber and sometimes just steel treads for pavement. Anyone that says you can't safely ride a horse on pavement has never been in a field with one. Most pastures have ground as hard as pavement (in the summer), plus there are rocks and all kinds of nasty shit out there. Running on pavement (when properly trained and with the right equipment) is easy mode. Ask the Romans, who paved roads especially for horse travel.

  tl;dr- Horses are absolute machines. Paved road doesn't hurt them in most cases." - Shatophiliac

"to encourage them, they yell Tesco"

Vids: [Anonemoosity] [notaffiliated] [TheSlamp] [TaytoCrisps] [safaridiscoclub]

Are most of the comments claiming that the “Gypsies” are destroying their horses out of antiziganism as the last article is suggesting, or is that really what’s going on?

Sources / More info: reddit, vidz

zamo, horses, cai, antiziganism, gypsies, roma