Introduction:
Few voices in equestrian sport carry the weight of both competitive excellence and hard-earned perspective quite like Matt Brown’s.
A longtime member of the U.S. Eventing Team, Alternate for the Pan American Games, Alternate for the Olympic US team, and five-star competitor, Matt has spent decades at the highest levels of the sport. His perspective is further shaped by his partnership with Cecily Clark, an FEI dressage rider whose career and training philosophy are rooted in precision, feel, and the long-term well-being of the horse. Together, their combined experience spans disciplines, systems, and generations of horsemanship.
In this open letter, Matt and Cecily speak candidly to the horse world about realities they have witnessed from inside the sport. What follows is not written from the sidelines, nor from a place of outrage for outrage’s sake, but from lived experience, accountability, and deep respect for the animals at the center of equestrian sport.
This letter may be uncomfortable at times. It challenges long-standing norms, entrenched traditions, and the quiet compromises many have learned to accept. But it is offered in the spirit of progress, compassion, and a belief that equestrian sport can — and must — evolve into something worthy of the horses who make it possible.
Cecily and I have taken some time to gather all our thoughts around the recent events In equestrian sports. Below is the result. I’m sure this will piss off quite a few people but sometimes getting a little pissed off is what can finally generate change. Hopefully, everyone who reads this will take the time to read it to the end!! We have some proposed solutions, so please, please read the whole thing!!
Elephant in the Room
We have a huge problem, and I think we need to start admitting it.
Horse training, for most of its history, has been extremely brutal. The shadows of the harsh military origins of the sport still cast dark and heavy shadows across our arena walls today, still shaping the way we understand and train our horses. Horses were once tools of war, agriculture, and transportation, and expected to perform as such. They evolved to endure, obey, and survive, and we have responded by labeling anything less from them as misbehavior that cannot be accepted and must be corrected.
For centuries, we’ve justified doing some crazy shit to horses in the name of “training”.
If you grow up watching horses be “corrected”, “made to respect”, or “fixed” with rough tactics, these tactics eventually stop looking rough and start looking normal, necessary, and even highly skilled.
We’ve learned to recognize what science now tells us are signs of fear, confusion, pain, panic, and desperation as disobediences that must be addressed. We have built an entire sport and training system upon the fallacy that horses are powerful and dangerous and therefore must be made to submit, taught to obey, never allowed to take advantage or “win”.
We anthropomorphize them and mistake their natural instincts for crafty insubordination. But we now know, thanks to modern advanced imaging, neuroscience, veterinary medicine, and generations of observation, that this is wrongheaded. They are ANIMALS, with their own set of instincts and biology that make them behave and react the way they do, they aren’t schemers capable of spite, and they aren’t deserving of our often brutal corrections.
And unlike ancient times, the world no longer depends on horses, so doing anything other than watching them frolic in green meadows is an unnecessary and frivolous luxury, making any and all reasoning for anything that resembles unethical or mistreatment completely inexcusable.
We GET to work with, ride, and compete horses. We need to start treating and training horses like the privilege it is, rather than abusing that privilege in the name of “tradition”, or “the outsider just doesn’t understand”, or “we need to protect the integrity and origins of the sport and not let cancel culture change it”.
If the only way to preserve this sport is to continue to excuse rough treatment of horses, then the sport should not be preserved.
Two things can be true at the same time: we can love horses deeply and still be shaped by and a part of a system that harms them. Admitting one does not negate the other, and unless we unapologetically examine our traditions, they become dogma, and dogma is almost impossible to see from the inside.
As we become more educated about our horses, and science debunks myth after deeply entrenched myth about how they learn and experience the world, how can a sport that literally could not even exist without horses expect to survive if its bedrock principle is not the absolute and unwavering protection and preservation of their well-being?
The sport cannot become more important than the horse itself.
Any rule, treatment, or act that is not completely aligned with a deep love, respect, and reverence for these animals and their unique biology must be purged from the sport.
And we must make it very clear to every participant and stakeholder in the sport that we will not look the other way, we won’t continue to uncomfortably giggle when we’re disturbed by what we’re watching, and we won’t keep dirty secrets anymore. This is owning up to and naming our flaws and weaknesses is not cancel culture, it’s holding people with a great responsibility to our horses accountable. It’s breaking from the traditions that will render the sport a brutal relic of the past so that we can move forward with a sport that will finally make us deserving of what these animals give us.
Our Traditions
I don’t condemn our traditions from atop a pedestal, I condemn them from my own experiences and participation. I do not seek to stand above or distance myself from those who err, rather, I seek to distance myself, and the sport I love, from who we used to be, and help find a path forward towards what we need to be.
I think most of us grew up in some version of this sport where toughness was rewarded, and “getting it done” mattered more than understanding why “it” was happening in the first place. I believed in this system because it was all I knew, I saw and felt it working, and I was being rewarded for utilizing it with a successful business and FEI rankings.
But over the last decade, through many of the heights of my personal and professional successes, my own horsemanship has changed dramatically. Reflection upon moments in my past that I’m not proud of, when I’ve been a blind acolyte to tradition, has led me towards rebuilding my approach to horses and training them from a place of curiosity rather than force, observation rather than control, and flexibility rather than agenda. Some of this may be to my own professional and competitive detriment, this way of training is not fast or results driven, but it has been to my personal and spiritual benefit knowing that I am trying every single day to be better for my horses than I was the day before, and that I recognize in myself less the rough and tumble horseman of my youth.
These changes haven’t come easily or dramatically - they’ve trickled in slowly (far too slowly I’m sure if you asked the horses); in the bitter aftertaste of a ride where I lost my patience, in the sharp stab of regret upon seeing the limp of a horse I should have rested instead of injected, in the lingering nausea of shame I felt after watching a video of a double clear round at a five star where my whip made far too many cameos in the performance. These changes were inspired by a disgust in my own behavior, as well as by a what I observed in others.
As I made my way up the levels of the sport, and into high performance, into a place where I was supposed to be a part of the upper echelons that represented the best of the best, the cognitive dissonance grew overwhelmingly loud and impossible to deny, because what I saw at the top of the sport from more of an insiders perspective deeply disappointed me.
As I was faced with decisions that felt like choosing between my ethics and success, I had to take a much harder look at myself, my actions, my methods, my ego, and start recognizing where I needed to change.
I’ve had to confront some uncomfortable truths about myself and my history with horses: I’ve harmed horses by doing what I thought was “right”. I’ve caused them fear and confusion when I thought I was correcting them. I’ve used too much pressure, lost my patience, and blamed horses for my own lack of skill, imagination, and understanding. In an effort to change, I’ve sought out therapists, psychiatrists, sports psychologists, and mentors. I’ve immersed myself in books, articles and podcasts on mindset, equine psychology, equine behavior, and equine physiology. And I still struggle and make mistakes. I still wish sometimes I could forget what I’ve learned and take the quicker, harsher, often times more effective way out rather than actually having to think critically about how to resolve a problem a horse may be having. And still I come up short, despite my best efforts.
Lately I see some of the sins and secrets that we all carry, to varying degrees, breaking free and bubbling to the surface, and I can’t say I’m surprised to see it, knowing what I know about my own misdeeds, as well as those of others. While I don’t think I can say that I’ve gone to any extremes, I know I’ve erred.
But I don’t think this current moment is simply about viral videos, condemning a few people for losing their tempers or making terrible choices, rather, it’s about recognizing and trying to rectify a culture that normalizes roughness, excuses pressure driven mistakes, and stays quiet in the name of loyalty, tradition, or fear. This isn’t just about a few bad apples, this is about recognizing that we have an outdated worldview that permeates barns, warm up rings, and federation rulebooks.
Meeting this moment is about collectively working to repair a system that leaves people under enormous pressure without the education, tools, support, or the emotional regulation they need to do right by their horses. There’s a famous saying by the legendary trainer Ray Hunt: make the wrong thing difficult and the right thing easy. Our system does the opposite, often rewarding the wrong ways and making the right ways almost career threateningly hard.
And part of our problem is that we all resort to thinking, “well, if a horse was being treated so badly, they wouldn’t perform so well”. Believe me, there are days when I ask myself if training with less force and pressure is actually the right way, because consistently and without fail I watch rough, punishing, cruel, tactless, unkind, stiff, head-wagging, chin-to-chest, restrictive riding get rewarded. And I think, maybe that is the way… but then I remember what I’ve learned about flooding and learned helplessness in horses, and I remember how I know first-hand that a shut-down horse often behaves more reliably than a happy, unstifled one. I remember how I am literally in awe of horses every day, even after 40 years with them, for the crazy things they let us do with or to them. I’ve learned it is a mistake to equate performance and competitive success with a horse that must be happy and well treated. Horses, like humans, have an instinct to survive, and if experience has taught them that obedience equals survival, then we must learn to recognize what that looks like rather than rewarding it.
The Problems
Just get a video!
So much of the abuse that happens is so quick it can’t be noticed and videoed in time. I saw a horse punched in the face in warm up at a 4 star. A highly respected coach was there directing the warming up of that esteemed rider. They said nothing. The groom said nothing. Rough riding continued but the horse wasn’t punched in the face again. I would have had to be videoing before the incident occurred in order to actually capture it. I went and got a steward and told them what I saw, but by the time the steward arrived, the riding had smoothed out (partially due, no doubt, to the fact that the steward arrived). Nothing could be done to the rider because the steward didn’t witness the punch… it was only my account.
At another event I called out a well known trainer for repeatedly and violently jerking a students horse in the mouth after they had fallen off. I went and got a steward as the trainer took the horse back to the barn and continued the rough treatment. The trainer told me to mind my own business. He then approached me after and called me a motherfucking do gooder to my face in front of the steward. The steward told me to walk away (which I did). Nothing more was done, as far as I know.
Abuses in our sport run the gamut - Horses being competed with known tendon injuries and lamenesses, or nerved feet. Horses getting nerve blocks before jogs. Horses being lunged in rolkur for the better part of an hour before their dressage tests, legs getting wire brushed and sweat-wrapped with chemicals before show jumping. Water being withheld or made unpalatable, heads being tied up. Horses being intentionally flipped over fences to teach them to back themselves off, rapping legs, using fishing wire, carpet tacks, and inverted oxers to make them more careful. Whipping that leaves raised and bloody welts. Calming pastes and tight nosebands seem quaint compared to what is being done in the name of high-level, competitive performance on a regular basis. And this list is by no means complete, these are just some of the things I know about first hand in the high-performance world.
How it makes me feel
I am heartened when I see the good ones out there - the people who have figured out how to train ethically, with kindness and compassion, and also win. But those people are the rarest exception rather than the rule, I can assure you.
What I’ve seen and what I know, both the extreme, and also the arguably less egregious and mundane: horses being treated as soul-less objects, vehicles for personal success and gain. Horses being yanked on and yelled at, being overfaced and blamed for mistakes. Horses being smacked for whinnying to their friends, kicked in the guts for pawing in the cross ties, bullied on to trailers with lunge whips, brooms and lip chains. I shield my eyes when I’m at shows because, even though much of it is not the worse abuse a person can think of, or even what many people would consider an abnormal way to treat horses, my heart can’t take watching horses being treated with so little care and compassion. Some abuse is violent, some is just a disregard for the horse as an animal with a soul and a biology different than ours. Some is born out of fear, some out of anger, some out of boredom, some out of routine, and some out of just not knowing any better. From the idols of the sport, to the newbie kid with the under-muscled, wormy, lame horse, perpetually attached to a stud chain, there are varying levels of harm, and varying levels of intent.
All of these things have made me less able to stomach the sport I love. It makes me jaded, and question hidden secrets behind any success I see, wondering what’s actually happening behind the barn doors - because what I’ve seen tells me that many of our heroes shouldn’t be. I long for the horses being mistreated to misbehave, to protest in the ring, to refuse to participate. But somehow they show up day after day and put one foot impeccably in front of the other, making me feel even more strongly that if we can’t change we well and truly may not deserve to keep them.
It’s heartbreaking. It’s soul-crushing. It defies anyone’s sense of karma being a bitch. From what I’ve seen, she seems to be just about as blind as justice, and not in the good way.
The way the sport is now has taken the breath out of me, and some days it takes the desire to be any part of it out of me as well.
I often ask myself what’s the point of working this hard to do it right when it often can’t compete with the harsh methods that create robots out of the ones that can take it, and chew up and spit out the ones that can’t.
Speaking up - a recent case study
I know I’m not the only one seeing these things, and I know I’m not the only one that’s disturbed.
But when you see the people that do speak up getting pummeled and ripped to shreds, or when you see the inner workings of the FEI Tribunals like we just did recently, you start to understand why those of us who know, stay quiet.
At that tribunal, the voices of the witnesses were questioned, devalued, and met with skepticism, while the voices of the respondent and his witnesses seemed to be met with the benefit of the doubt and an eagerness to accept and rationalize the justifications for the documented and corroborated occurrences of abuse. The panel hid behind provably false justifications like: such a short instance of abuse could not possibly cause long-term trauma to a horse.
Excuse me while my brain explodes…
If a child is regularly hit by her parent, but is never hit for longer than 10 seconds, are we to assume that she couldn’t possibly be scarred for life from those experiences?
The brevity of the suspension and low dollar amount of the fines meted out exposed the tribunals decision for what it was - an unserious and unprofessional lip-syncing act meant to look like accountability.
The length of time that it took for the accusations against the respondent to be investigated (only taken up AFTER being blasted about on social media), shows how (un)seriously the federations take claims of abuse. Most situations will not have the video and picture evidence that were provided in this case, so how can any one person be expected to speak up and think they’ll be taken seriously if all they have are the eyes in their head?
The Solutions - accountability, safe ways to speak out, compassion
The approach
If we love this sport, and if we love these horses, we must take real, concrete, uncomfortable steps towards progress, or the sport and the horses will be lost to us.
Still, I do not think we should condemn wholesale the perpetrators of abuses. I want people to be held accountable, and accountability is not the opposite of compassion. We can disavow and be horrified by the actions of humans without exploiting that opportunity to be cruel to the human. We must still acknowledge the humanity inside of people who do wrong things. In fact, that’s the only way to actually change things. If we cop out and say that only a monster could do such things, then we don’t actually face the reality - that humans are capable of doing despicable things, even without necessarily having despicable intentions. And if we don’t face reality, we will miss the opportunity to stop the cycle of abuse because we won’t be able to change the CULTURE of abuse.
Punishment alone won’t fix this - education, rehabilitation, and mentoring must be central to any reform if we want any real change.
What we are confronting now isn’t just a string of individual failures, but a cultural inheritance. In order for the sport to survive, indeed, in order to prove it deserves to survive, we must be willing to examine the systems that shaped us, shaped our teachers, shaped our heroes, and shaped our blind spots. And we must be brave enough to rebuild.
The Standards
We must take seriously and actually require a mandatory certification (and periodic re-certification) process for anyone getting paid to ride and train horses, teach students, care for horses, or run a staff.
It must include not just education and proficiency requirements for riding, teaching and general horse care knowledge, but also clear criteria for what constitutes both horse and human abuse.
We need to make that certification process affordable and accessible.
The Environment
We cannot preach ethics while normalizing poverty-level wages for grooms or financially precarious conditions for trainers. Desparation breeds shortcuts, while stability breeds integrity.
Bad people are going to do bad things, but most people are far more nuanced then simply good or bad. Good people will do bad things when they’ve run out of tools, or run out of patience, or feel the need to produce an immediate result. As professionals, very few of us are in a position where we can afford to not show results and still expect to have a business over time. Not that the free market shouldn’t do its work, but the traits of good horsemanship, hard work, talent and good business practices are not usually the most important factors in determining whether a business is successful or not - winning results are.
There is never going to be a way to get rid of all pressures, but, creating the expectation, industry wide, that boarding and training businesses will run as businesses - where workers are paid more than subsistence wages, all operating expenses are more than just covered, and training fees are enough so that trainers themselves actually get paid a salary to allow for retirement savings and quality of life. We cannot survive or have a healthy mindset if literally every single horse in training staying on is the difference between paying all our bills that month or not. The number of horse trainers that don’t have health insurance or a retirement savings is staggering. The number of grooms and farm workers who lack those necessities is criminal.
It sounds simplistic or maybe counter-intuitive, but the easiest way for me to always choose to do right by you and your horse is if you and your horse don’t actually matter to my bottom line - because then I can tell you what your horse actually needs, even if what it needs could lose me money. I can tell you the hard things - like that your horse isn’t suitable for the job you want it to do, or it’s not ready to move up to preliminary, without worrying that if I tell you the truth you don’t want to hear, I’ll lose your business and I won’t be able to pay the rent this month. The financial picture I’m painting for us horse professionals may sound hyperbolic, but I promise you, it’s not.
The industry needs to normalize charging what it costs to run a functioning and successful business. It’s in the best interest of the horses for the businesses they’re in to be thriving.
The Rules
We need to shift the culture of training horses away from hardness and towards softness, and our competition rules must reflect those values.
If we don’t want people to misuse whips, then we should get rid of them in competition, so that the industry itself is saying “horses don’t need to be whipped to be competed or trained”. Will that stop all excessive whipping or all heavy handedness? Of course not.
But, people train at home for what the competition tests. If I’m competing in an FEI where I can’t carry a whip in to the ring, I’d be silly not to practice without a whip at home. And then maybe I start learning how to not rely on my whip to get my horse in front of my leg.
What’s modeled and accepted at shows will carry over to training at home, so we need to be far more bold in making our competition rules reflect our ethics, as well as more regularly calling out mistreatment on show grounds. We need our officials to be brave. We need observers to be brave - and believed.
We need all of our warm up rings to be videod, from dawn to dusk, so that we can show that we take how horses are being ridden seriously. A few stewards cannot see everything that is happening in every warm up at all times, get riders in to the ring on time, and check equipment.
There needs to be real accountability for cases of mistreatment, and “I didn’t see it” at a stewarded horse show can no longer be our fallback reason for lack of accountability.
Oversight
The federations need to have an independent oversight board that is made up of veterinarians, equine behavioralists, animal ethicists, sports ethicists, human resource professionals, workers rights ethicists, and more, to advise the federation and sign off on all rules.
The Workers - the Witnesses
We need to create a system where “whistleblowers” feel protected, so that they won’t feel the need to use social media to arbitrate their grievances.
There needs to be something like an independent grooms union that makes clear to every groom and person that works in a barn what is ok and what’s not in terms of employment conditions and treatment.
That union needs to have a supportive reporting system in place and people like union reps that can help someone through the process of reporting and documenting mistreatment of humans or horses. The union should conduct random and regular barn visits, conducting oversight and creating an environment of support and resources for barn workers, and an expectation among professionals that it is not the duty of our workers to keep our secrets, rather it is our duty to create a healthy and safe environment for our horses to live, and our employees to work.
We MUST create a better and safer yet effective way for people to speak out so that bad actors can be identified, and held accountable. If there is a reliably effective system in place we won’t need social media to police the industry.
Accountability
We need to create a system that can adjudicate fairly and transparently, without needing to have it out in the court of public opinion. Where people can do their time, focus on rehabilitation, and, depending on the severity of the crime, be welcomed back in to the fold.
I want there to be a published list of verbal warnings given out at any venue, public or private, rated or not. Mistreat a horse at a schooling show? The person running that show needs to report it to the federation. Mistreat a horse out schooling? The person running the facility must report it to the federation. Anything that ends up going unreported must be a strike against the venue.
Any person on that list must be contacted by the federation and automatically required to participate in an educational program and mentorship with oversight. Anyone displaying a pattern of abuse, or egregious abuse must be referred to an independent tribunal for investigation and arbitration.
So many of the abusers only do so because they know no other way. We can give people a chance to become educated and to do better. We can make the expectations clear enough to every person entering the sport that abusive methods will not be tolerated.
We can actually do something about this… we just have to actually DO SOMETHING and stop pretending the problems don’t exist in hopes that no one will notice, in a misguided effort to “protect” the sport. Denying our problems is not protecting the sport, it’s aiding and abetting it, making us all complicit in its sins, and putting the sport MORE at risk. So we need to turn the sport in, hold everyone participating in it accountable, so that it can become better and able to last long into the future.
The Inflection Point
I know my perspective will anger some and comfort others. I know some people will find me jealous, naive, idealistic, threatening, or just downright wrong. I know some will say my softness is weakness, and also know some will be very mad at me for what I’ve said and insinuated. I know I’ll be called a motherfucking do-gooder, and I’m sure far worse, by many - to my face, on social media, and behind my back. My dressage scores may suffer. My business may suffer.
I have wanted to say so much of this before. I’ve wanted to expose the bad actors and see them held accountable for their transgressions. I’ve wanted to be far more specific, making those I’m speaking of far more identifiable than I am here. And I’m sure I’ll get pushback from those who think I’m weak for not doing so.
And while it’s true, I am scared of what speaking out could do to my own standing in the sport, ultimately this is about more than me, and it’s about more than just naming and shaming individuals, because focusing on the individuals won’t bring about the cultural and systemic changes that are truly needed right now.
We stand at a cross roads in equestrian sport. Our social license is fraying and our welfare standards are stuck in a bygone, analog era.
This moment is asking us which future we want for our sport, and whether that future will be built on the wobbly and often indefensible foundations of the past - the hard path of tradition, denial, and quiet complicity; or if we will instead choose to start anew with a system that truly values, promotes, and enforces the ethical treatment and training of horses - the soft path built upon education, science, compassion, and humility.
The soft path is the only future that I believe is actually worthy of the horses who give us everything. And we should choose it, not because it protects the sport’s image and ensures its continuation, but because it’s the one that protects the very horses who allow the sport to exist at all. Protecting only the sport and its traditions, and not the horses themselves, will only ensure the sport’s demise. Horse welfare cannot be an afterthought or an inconvenience to the sport, it must be the entire point of the sport.
I don’t want to be a part of a sport that survives by keeping secrets. I want to be a part of a sport that thrives because it chooses to evolve.
Matt and Cecily
Photo credit: Tina Fitch for Shannon Brinkman and Shannon Brinkman
Additional Resources
Listen to Matt Brown on the Dear horse World podcast:
