What a lame excuse...even Dubja was more professional than trump and his administration. And what lame excuses you try to apply is even more terrifying. If there are other, more pressing problems than animal welfare laws, why is this administration wasting time with deregulating the friggin´ safety standards for animal food, then?

"...a major focus of his victory speech spoke to mending the divide...". Woah! Where´s the dimensional portal that gratend you access to this reality? ´Cause you obviously must come from an alternative one...probably from the galaxy of "opposite day"....;)

maybe you should stop defending president Bannon in a zoophile sub and just fuck off back to the_donald, thanks.

He has only been in office for fourteen days so not everything is inked out or finalized yet

Executive orders are pretty final. He's signed a record number and been pretty mute about explaining a good number of them to the general public.

The United States has a lot more problems that need addressing before animal welfare

We were doing it before. What's so urgent that we had to abort this whole hog to get to it? Can you name anything that really benefited from this? Anything?

Honestly, people might give him a chance if he didn't act so batshit insane and unpredictable on a daily basis. There is nothing good that can possibly come of this. Nothing.

Fuck this MAGA (Make America Great Again, for the uninitiated) crap, when did America stop being great and why did I miss the memo? If anything, it's going down the shitter faster than George Bush x2 could've ever dreamed up.

Fuck, that´s bad.

Surely you´re partially right with your criticism, but there are incidents you cannot handle as a private person or a group of people. What if the owner of the neglected horses won´t hand them over voluntarily? You´ll need government, police...anyone with power to seize the animals. In the last public stables I attended, there was an old guy, probably around 60. He owned two horses, one of them, a white gelding was cancerous , obviously had stomach or colon cancer, almost no teeth left in his mouth and was unable to eat. He had constant diarrhea and all the grain of his muesli also came out completely undigested. Also, he was arthritic on all four legs and had to constantly lean against the wall of his box to ease the pain. His owner already had "history"...I still remember the drama when his last horse, which he replaced with a promising young mare, died...or should i say, miserably died. This horse collapsed right in front of his box and the owner refused to call a vet, saying " Just leave him alone, he´ll be okay for sure." ...well, in all of my years as a professional rider, I never, NEVER heard a horse literally screaming of pain...it was terrible, nightmare invoking. But the owner had to be forced by me to accept calling a vet. The first vet arrived and after a short diagnosis, he took me aside and said that it´s hopeless and this horse should be freed from suffering as quick as possible. When I told this to the owner, he denied euthanasia harshly for over an hour...and all of that with the constant soundtrack of an equine horror movie playing in the back. After this hour, the vet left ´cause he had other apoointments, the owner still refused to do anything. I called a second vet, the one I had for my mare. When this vet arrived, the owner also tried to evade the sad but obvious...but my vet insisted to do euthanasia as it was the only thing that could be done for this horse. My vet approached the owner directly and said "I won´t leave until this horse is freed from his suffering!" It took another ten minutes for both of us to "convince" the owner....the "soundtrack of horror" still playing along... I literally had to pull the owner off, screaming at him he should accept his responsibility and the inevitable, almost taking him into a chokehold so the vet was able to do the necessary. When the horrible noises finally ceased, I couldn´t hardly contain myself, the impulse to kick the owner´s ass was overwhelming in me....

Honestly, how do you solve such a terrible situation without any authority? All the other horseowners had tried their luck convincing this guy to do the right thing, but failed. And that only was "problem #1"...the poor white gelding, remember? Until I quitted my job, he still was standing in his dark box 24 hours a day, poorly taken care of, inappropriately fed with grain instead of mash...and in this case, even my vet and the official vet couldn´t do a thing. What if you run into such "owners" who are too greedy to buy appropriate food for their horses because it costs a bit more than the cheapest available? By the way, it took only half a year after the purchase of his promising mare until she developed issues with her legs because that jerk wasn´t riding her but used his longe to make her trot and gallop around him in an approximately 5 meter diameter around him while he was standing there, making phone calls. If you do this on a daily basis, the bones in the front leg fetlocks are literally grinded into flour like consistency...and the longer he had her, then worse her legs got.

Your criticism of authorities is partially legit, but how can you deal with such terrible horseowners? I don´t believe the solution is to diminuish the possibility to interfere, I believe the government isn´t doing ENOUGH instead. I tried my best to protect the horses from their apparently inept owner, but even the official vet (Amtstierarzt) couldn´t do a thing if an animal isn´t in a state comparable to the poor horse the owner refused to redeem from the pain.

As a private person, you can´t do a thing and are condemned to tolerate (in the literal meaning of the word)/endure this, forced to turn a blind eye. It still makes me incredibly angry to just talk/write about this. And that wasn´t even the worst I experienced. I agree that interference should not be possible on a random basis, but you´ll need authorities, laws etc. in certain cases. When I was an apprentice, my instructor got a phone call. Several terribly neglected horses had to be seized from a totally incompetent owner and it took a local animal welfare organisation we contacted and the police for the asshole to hand over his horses. I´ve seen quite a lot of horrible injuries in horses, broken legs, wide gaping wounds and such, but these horses ....have you ever seen a horse leg that is just a hoof and raw meat before? There are certain occasions in which authorities are needed more than a bunch of people. If the neglected animals aren´t handed over voluntarily, you´re screwed without authorities...and the poor animals are double screwed.