A short PSA re the Fugly Blog

Parents, if your kid is reading this, you need to get some Net Nanny type software. I use the F word here pretty much daily and any cyber censoring software would almost certainly block it.

This blog is a snarky, sarcastic take on the horse world peppered with the same language as an HBO Comedy Special. If you think Sarah Silverman, for example, is inappropriate for your child to watch on TV, then I would recommend not letting your child read this blog. Really, parents, you gotta watch your kids. Don't worry about me, worry about Chester the Molester who has a Myspace where he pretends to be a 14 year old boy who looks like one of the Jonas brothers. There is a TON of software out there to help you track what your kid does on the web. BUY IT. Stop worrying about what your kid might think about backyard breeders and worry about whether or not your kid will live to see adulthood! Go read the Center for Missing and Exploited Children if you need to scare yourself into paying attention to what your kid does on the web. Statistics show ONE IN SEVEN kids get solicited for sex online. And you are worrying about the Fugly blog? You've got way worse things to worry about if you don't know what your teenage daughter is up to on the web.

I do not advise my readership to directly contact any of the breeders, trainers, owners, etc that I have featured here in a negative light and I do not do so myself, unless they directly contact me first. Any e-mail allegedly received from me that is not a response to an e-mail FROM the featured individual is a FAKE. 100% of the time. I do respond to hate mail, 'cause sometimes it's just all too entertaining to do so.

Is the Pope responsible for the wacko who shoots an abortion doctor just because the Pope decrees abortion is evil and a lot of people listen to him and value his opinion? Of course not! You cannot control people who take inappropriate actions in response to hearing or reading your opinions and beliefs. There will always be someone who misinterprets what you have to say and takes inappropriate action as a result. Remember back in the 80s when parents were arguing that Ozzy Osbourne's music made teenagers kill themselves?

An angry blog does not cause angry actions. I vent here and many horsepeople enjoy having a place to vent. It is an appropriate way to deal with the anger so many of us feel about the overbreeding of low quality horses that leads to so many dying in the slaughterhouse, horse abuse and neglect in general, and all of the things that frustrate us in the horse world. We vent and we commiserate and we support each other. In our real lives, we donate and we rescue and we take good care of our own horses and we do try to lead by example. Many of us spend time educating others and making them better riders and better horse owners.

I am an anti-slaughter advocate but for YEARS the anti-slaughter people have been screaming that there isn't a horse overpopulation problem. I used to buy into that rhetoric too and then I looked around me at the auctions and said, um, are y'all smoking crack, there IS TOO a horse overpopulation problem. But it's a specific type of horse - poorly bred, poorly conformed and poorly/un trained. That's what we have too many of. You can't end slaughter unless you dry up the supply. I'm committed to drying up the supply of horses whose highest and best use, strictly economically speaking, is as food!

Folks, I've said it before - if this blog prevents ONE horse from going to slaughter, if it gets ONE horse out of a bad situation, then as far as I'm concerned, I've done my job. I have never thought that the "style" of this blog would be everybody's cup of tea. (But what is?) I knew that enough people would relate to it that I'd probably get more readers than just my friends, but I did not in any way anticipate the way it took off.

That said, the mere fact that my traffic is as high as it is provides enough evidence for me that my writing style is effective. You know, it's like the first time you got a college professor who really got into his subject passionately and swore and ranted and had really strong opinions. Your first reaction was, OMG, did Professor Whatsit REALLY say "shit" in CLASS? OMG. OMG. But I bet you didn't sleep through his class like you did old Drone-A-Way Jones. I'm not saying anything new here. The difference is, nobody's sleeping through my lecture.

I'm not going to change the blog. I'm not going to tone it down. Want a kinder, gentler blog on these topics? WRITE ONE YOURSELF...Blogger is free! If you are offended by FHOTD, by all means, do not read it. It would be like me reading pro-slaughter propaganda - why, to piss myself off? Because I enjoy being upset? How silly. If you find the language and writing style here inappropriate for children, by all means keep your child off it. It's not Disneyland and it has never been represented as such.

Now, on to some happy news, I mentioned that I'd just found out about a daughter of Alysheba for sale for $300 from some guys who, and I quote, did not know horses were going to be this expensive to feed. The mare won $188K on the track. My friend Stephanie decided to buy her today and that mare is safe and will stay safe. Ultimately, that's the driving force of my life - preventing equine suffering. It's not being liked or popular. It's not being a good example for your kid. The first thing I do every morning is go out to the barn with a pail of steaming hot alfalfa pellet mush for my 35 year old rescue horse, who stands at the fence nickering wildly with excitement. She thinks I am the coolest person ever because I am bringing her food she can eat, after she nearly died two years ago from starvation. Now, that's an opinion I care about. She can tell me what to do and I'll do it. You two-legged folks don't stand a chance.