The Tack Room - A City of Horses

You can take the girl out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the girl. I have brought the country to the city with a hot stable, the sweet smell of straw and molasses, and horse ownership in a concrete forest. This is horses in Sydney’s CBD, so welcome to The Tack Room...

Horse Ownership in Sydney - The Tack Room

Horse Ownership Made Illegal

November 8th 2006 14:26

A movie happened itself upon me last weekend. Children of Men tells an insightful tale of the world mid-this century where women are infertile and the degeneration of society is disastrous. Possessions are limited, luxuries a rarity and the poles between rich and poor are vast. And the underlying vacuum appears to be that humanity has made such a job of the environment that every place and every individual has become uninhabitable. Which livened up my imagination and I came to wondering about the possibilities of horse ownership ever becoming illegal..!

God forbid that I should go to any Heaven where there are no horses, R. B. Cunningham-Graham wrote to Theodore Roosevelt in 1917. Imagine then if neither heaven nor earth had them…

Rarely is it surprising these days when higher levels of water restrictions are implemented. I imagine there were days when washing your car was a Sunday chore on the driveway and watering the garden was not a luxury. We live with new and ridiculous restrictions every day all for a greater good, and what if one day the drought became so desperate – the Murray was dry and rain had not been felt on our hides for over three years or something close to that– that owning a horse was a luxury outlawed. Imagine the legislation that would state that horses require excessive levels of water for hydration and cleaning, hay and feed requirements were exhaustive on an already empty NSW countryside and that horse ownership was counter-productive to the environmental effort. What if one day the government philosophised that the horse industry’s contribution to NSW GDP was minimal and desperate times called for desperate measures?

First to go were horses like mine, animals individually owned and loved. We canter about like headless chickens looking for new homes for them but cannot afford international freight and so many end up on the meat line and owners like me are spirit broken. Then the equestrian disciplines begin to trickle - the eventers and jumpers and dressage horses whose sports are not populated or supported enough to be salvaged. Gradually trotting disappears and so our angry spirits turn to racing, and the government fights to save this multi-billion dollar industry but the horse owners aren’t having it – it’s all or nothing!

The empty horse track at Centennial Park a common sight?

The sound of iron on pavement becomes extinct in Centennial Park. The stables at Randwick are quiet and overgrown with neglect. The Melbourne Cup is largely an import’s purse that no longer stops the nation. A pony ride at the Easter Show costs a term of school fees. We tell our kids about horses, about how they feel and what they sound like, about how they smell and little girls stop dreaming of getting a pony and keeping it in the bedroom.

A world without horses. Could we get used to that?

The Tack Room - A City of Horses

Horse Ownership in Sydney - The Tack Room

Horse Ownership Made Illegal

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