AUSTRALIAN HEATH RYAN REPEATEDLY WHIPS HORSE
By CNN
Published: June 13, 2025 at 2:23PM EDT
Australian dressage rider has been provisionally suspended and will be investigated, according to Equestrian Australia (EA), after a video emerged on social media that appears to show him repeatedly whipping a horse.
Heath Ryan, who represented Australia in dressage at the 2008 Olympics, can be seen in the video – which the rider said is about two years old – hitting a horse around 40 times.
Ryan said in a lengthy Facebook post defending the incident that everything in the video “transpired sincerely with the (horse’s) best interests the sole consideration.”
Did you ‘get’ that?
Ryan said in a lengthy Facebook post defending the incident that everything in the video “transpired sincerely with the (horse’s) best interests the sole consideration.”
Really?
Seriously?
The suspension comes as the international dressage world is still trying to restore its social licence following another horse whipping scandal involving Great Britain’s three-time Olympic champion Charlotte Dujardin, who received a one-year suspension from international competition after video of her whipping a horse was released on the eve of the 2024 Paris Games.
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We’ve been threatened by those in the horse racing industry and those who benefit from horse slaughter more times than we can count.
But we are not going away.
We are going to persist until horse slaughter no longer exists for any purpose within Australia -- and until the horse racing industry makes drastic changes.
We are going to continue our hands-on work to offer lifelong sanctuary to as many horses as possible. We generally have 20 at just one of our locations - at any given time.
We have the acreage to take on more horses as financial support allows.
COGNITIVE DISSONANCE
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DOGGERS
AN OPEN LETTER TO THOSE DEFENDING DOGGERSThis is directed at those who defend "doggers". But first, there may be those who don't know what a dogger is. In Australia, a person who collects, buys or is given horses and takes them to slaughter is known as a dogger....
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