The news about Charlotte Dujardin makes me weary.

British Olympian Charlotte Dujardin has been filmed repeatedly hitting a horse with a whip during a coaching session, and subsequently dropped out of/has been dropped from representing team GB at the Paris Olympics with just two days to go.

I think it’s fair to say that this news has sent shockwaves through the equestrian community. Charlotte was supposed to be one of the good ones, showing the world that it was possible to win at the highest possible levels with horses who are treated like horses and not machines. She is famous for competing horses who get turnout and are hacked out, things that were rare for dressage horses at that level. She was an early adopter of wearing a helmet rather than a top hat to compete in, and her gold medal win wearing a jockey skull cap at London 2012 is thought to have been a pivotal influential moment for other top and amateur riders to follow suit. She is supposed to represent progress; and it is with surprise and great sadness that we have learned that somebody we thought was a great role model has acted like anything but. Watching somebody who is supposed to be better than that fail does seem to hurt the most. Marginalised people whose allies let them down often talk about those incidents hurting the most - it feels more personal when somebody is supposed to be better than that.

I suspect another reason why this video has landed so heavily with us is that this is far from the first time that most of us have seen somebody treating a horse badly, and we are weary. I don’t need to name the internet-famous viral videos of big names making what they would probably call “regrettable one-off mistakes” in eventing, nor the modern pentathlon horsemanship at the last Olympics, nor the many jockeys who have been found to be in breach of whip use rules. I will however list some moments off the top of my head that I have witnessed in person:

1) Watching a demo from a natural horsemanship trainer where it was obvious that the way they were treating the horse (a foal for goodness sake) was going to result in the foal rearing up and falling over. The trainer said with their words that they were being careful not to let the foal rear and fall; their actions said otherwise, and it happened. The foal got up okay, but there was absolutely no need to push him to the point where he was rearing, let alone so high that he fell over backwards.

2) Another live demo I attended, another natural horsemanship trainer, a household name, pretty much beat a scared horse into a trailer.

3) Yet another big name trainer, demonstrating allegedly scientifically sound principals of training, yanked a horse in the mouth with a bit in repeatedly over the course of a 30 minute groundwork demo. It looked to me as if he was doing it to create drama to then “fix”. He got his drama (rearing, where previously the horse hadn’t ), and he got to show that he could make the horse comply with him.

4) The dressage lesson I had with a “pro”, during which I was berated for not using my whip frequently enough or hard enough on my lovely but very novice and not at all sure what was being asked of him, cob. The only thing I can remember the pro saying is “tap tap tap SMACK! Smack him hard! You’re only tickling him, give him a wallop!!” I left in tears, my horse was stiff for two weeks, and obviously I never went back.

5) The young woman who had trouble catching her horse and once she had brought him into the stable, followed him in to yell, kick and hit him. Her mum dragged her out.

6) The countless times I’ve witnessed horses being whipped for errors that were their rider or handler’s not theirs, and been told myself to whip a horse for things like refusing a fence when I knew it was my error not theirs.

The tiring thing is that I’m far from the only one. I’m willing to bet that most of us have witnessed first hand horses being beaten up, often with a whip.

Why are we even surprised at this point? Whips can cause pain, they are designed to. We are kidding ourselves if we don’t acknowledge this. Yes absolutely they can be used for all sorts of other reasons - as an extension of the arm, to close off a direction of travel, to create a movement for the horse to move away from, to make a noise to attract their attention, to help desensitise a horse to touch, for precision of application of a gentle touch as an aid - all perfectly reasonable and non-abusive uses. And yet… the object we carry in our hands to do all this with is still capable of causing pain with very little effort from it’s user, and most horses have had one used to inflict pain on them at some point in their lives. I don’t think we are moving horse welfare forward very far unless and until we can all acknowledge that at a basic level, the whip can, and was designed to, cause pain.

I am weary. I don’t have answers, or at least not any that I think the horse world at large will go for.