Welcome to the Livejournal Horsemanship Community
What is this community about?
While planning out what I feel this community should be, I realised I could put together a cheesy acronym to summarise it. As everyone loves cheesy acronyms, that is what I did:
Helpful - everybody has stuff they know and stuff they don't know. This is a community in which we're all prepared to face up to our ignorance and share our knowledge and experience. There is nothing wrong with not knowing something.
Open-minded - We learn different things from different teachers, but our horses will be our greatest teachers and the ultimate judges of our horsemanship. It doesn't matter if you ride Western or English, if you compete over jumps or in dressage or driving or you don't compete at all, having a good understanding between you and your horse is really important. This community is not attached to any particular teacher, school or way of working. There are many different ways to get things right with our horses and we need to be able to make our own decisions about what will work for us and our horses. One purpose of this community is to help those to be informed decisions.
Respectful - By joining this community you are saying that you want to get things right for your horse. Appreciate that everyone else is making the same statement and try to avoid being too directly confrontational- by all means disagree, but simply telling someone "you're wrong" is like pushing on a horse- it will create a brace and resistance. That means that no matter how useful and well argued your advice it is unlikely to get through. Phrasing the same information more tactfully is much more likely to get your message across and to avoid things getting too emotional. Remember that nobody has room to post all the facts and it can be hard to judge which ones are relevant- if something seems strange ask the poster for more detail before assuming the worst. Respect is a two way street- if you have received advice on a question then please take it into account and don't just post the same question a week later without at least acknowledging the suggestions you have already had and explaining how they worked out for you or why you chose against following them up. Everybody appreciates a thank-you.
Supportive - We're all on the same side here, if you need advice then ask, if you are getting on well then let us know so we can cheer you on. This is a community for sharing our highs and our lows. The kind of middle-of-the-road "today was ok" stuff, that's maybe something to save for your personal journal but if things are going great and you want to tell people, or things are going terrible and you want people to comiserate, that's what we're here for.
Experimental - It's easy to talk the talk, but horsemanship is all about trying stuff with your horse- if you find good ideas here or come up with interesting things on your own, try them out and post about it, let everyone else know what worked for you and what didn't. Write stuff up, take pictures, take video, share it with the community. That way each step that we share has the potential to be a useful lesson or idea or starting point for everyone else in the community.
What does this mean in practice
It means that any horsemanship-related posts are welcome, the community is oriented towards our relationships with our horses, at work and play and our lives with them. So if you're wondering why you're having problems with lead changes, how you can help your horse build up a bit of muscle or what kind of bit might work best for your horse in the kind of work you plan to do, this is a great place to ask. If you have some philosophical musings on horsemanship, book or clinic reviews or other horsey experiences to share, we're all about that. If you're wondering whether anyone knows of a good lesson barn in Ohio then you may get better results posting in equestrian. If you have an urgent medical question call your vet - the community may be able to offer useful advice once you have a vet's diagnosis and be very helpful among more trivial stuff, but if you even think it might be serious then your vet (or possibly your farrier if it is a hoof issue) should always be your first port of call. If your question is "should I call the vet" the answer is yes, call them. If you have something to sell then sellyourtack is a good starting point. Quizzes, memes, funny news stories and email forwards along the lines of "10 reasons why horses are better than men" belong elsewhere.
If you are responding to someone else's post, be polite about it. You don't have to agree with what someone has to say and you don't have to think they are doing things right - debates can be very interesting for everyone involved as long as they stay calm and polite. Personal attacks are unnacceptable. If you feel that someone is acting in a way that is out of keeping with the spirit of the community please let me know.
Rules and Moderation
The community is lightly moderated to start with- everyone is welcome to join but users who don't find themselves able to work within the spirit of the community will be warned and if they choose to ignore warnings they will be removed. Off-topic posts will be removed at the moderators' discretion and if possible the moderator will notify the original poster as to why their post was removed.
Pictures, videos and long posts are welcome but in the interests of saving everybody's friends pages it would be generous to apply an lj-cut to anything over a couple of paragraphs of text or more than one picture/embedded video clip. How to do an LJ-Cut. Any pictures not kept behind an lj-cut should be reasonably small- less than 600 pixels wide would be ideal. I use Flickr for putting pictures online and their "medium" image size seems to be about right for LJ. You can also use any image program such as GIMP or Paint.net to resize images before uploading them.
While planning out what I feel this community should be, I realised I could put together a cheesy acronym to summarise it. As everyone loves cheesy acronyms, that is what I did:
Helpful - everybody has stuff they know and stuff they don't know. This is a community in which we're all prepared to face up to our ignorance and share our knowledge and experience. There is nothing wrong with not knowing something.
Open-minded - We learn different things from different teachers, but our horses will be our greatest teachers and the ultimate judges of our horsemanship. It doesn't matter if you ride Western or English, if you compete over jumps or in dressage or driving or you don't compete at all, having a good understanding between you and your horse is really important. This community is not attached to any particular teacher, school or way of working. There are many different ways to get things right with our horses and we need to be able to make our own decisions about what will work for us and our horses. One purpose of this community is to help those to be informed decisions.
Respectful - By joining this community you are saying that you want to get things right for your horse. Appreciate that everyone else is making the same statement and try to avoid being too directly confrontational- by all means disagree, but simply telling someone "you're wrong" is like pushing on a horse- it will create a brace and resistance. That means that no matter how useful and well argued your advice it is unlikely to get through. Phrasing the same information more tactfully is much more likely to get your message across and to avoid things getting too emotional. Remember that nobody has room to post all the facts and it can be hard to judge which ones are relevant- if something seems strange ask the poster for more detail before assuming the worst. Respect is a two way street- if you have received advice on a question then please take it into account and don't just post the same question a week later without at least acknowledging the suggestions you have already had and explaining how they worked out for you or why you chose against following them up. Everybody appreciates a thank-you.
Supportive - We're all on the same side here, if you need advice then ask, if you are getting on well then let us know so we can cheer you on. This is a community for sharing our highs and our lows. The kind of middle-of-the-road "today was ok" stuff, that's maybe something to save for your personal journal but if things are going great and you want to tell people, or things are going terrible and you want people to comiserate, that's what we're here for.
Experimental - It's easy to talk the talk, but horsemanship is all about trying stuff with your horse- if you find good ideas here or come up with interesting things on your own, try them out and post about it, let everyone else know what worked for you and what didn't. Write stuff up, take pictures, take video, share it with the community. That way each step that we share has the potential to be a useful lesson or idea or starting point for everyone else in the community.
What does this mean in practice
It means that any horsemanship-related posts are welcome, the community is oriented towards our relationships with our horses, at work and play and our lives with them. So if you're wondering why you're having problems with lead changes, how you can help your horse build up a bit of muscle or what kind of bit might work best for your horse in the kind of work you plan to do, this is a great place to ask. If you have some philosophical musings on horsemanship, book or clinic reviews or other horsey experiences to share, we're all about that. If you're wondering whether anyone knows of a good lesson barn in Ohio then you may get better results posting in equestrian. If you have an urgent medical question call your vet - the community may be able to offer useful advice once you have a vet's diagnosis and be very helpful among more trivial stuff, but if you even think it might be serious then your vet (or possibly your farrier if it is a hoof issue) should always be your first port of call. If your question is "should I call the vet" the answer is yes, call them. If you have something to sell then sellyourtack is a good starting point. Quizzes, memes, funny news stories and email forwards along the lines of "10 reasons why horses are better than men" belong elsewhere.
If you are responding to someone else's post, be polite about it. You don't have to agree with what someone has to say and you don't have to think they are doing things right - debates can be very interesting for everyone involved as long as they stay calm and polite. Personal attacks are unnacceptable. If you feel that someone is acting in a way that is out of keeping with the spirit of the community please let me know.
Rules and Moderation
The community is lightly moderated to start with- everyone is welcome to join but users who don't find themselves able to work within the spirit of the community will be warned and if they choose to ignore warnings they will be removed. Off-topic posts will be removed at the moderators' discretion and if possible the moderator will notify the original poster as to why their post was removed.
Pictures, videos and long posts are welcome but in the interests of saving everybody's friends pages it would be generous to apply an lj-cut to anything over a couple of paragraphs of text or more than one picture/embedded video clip. How to do an LJ-Cut. Any pictures not kept behind an lj-cut should be reasonably small- less than 600 pixels wide would be ideal. I use Flickr for putting pictures online and their "medium" image size seems to be about right for LJ. You can also use any image program such as GIMP or Paint.net to resize images before uploading them.