As part of the investigation and prosecution of juvenile crime I often find myself reviewing scores of pages of posts and comments from various social media that teens use. To do so is one of the most upsetting and saddening parts of my job. The picture that is revealed of the lives of many teenagers hurts to read.
I am not talking about the sexual references or the vulgarity. Those things have been a part of teenage life for a very long time. I am not even talking about the references to drinking and the absolute worship of the concept of "partying", though I despise few things in life more than I despise alcohol.
The worst part is the emptiness of the lives described. The lack of meaning is sad enough but what is even worse is that there is no search for, or even hope for, meaning to be found in page after page of posts. There is no appreciation, nor even recognition, of beauty, love, kindness or genuine affection. Instead one finds pages of angst, hostility, nihilism, and hints of true hatred.
We can do a lot of hand wringing and finger pointing to look at the cause of such pathos, but doing so accomplishes nothing. I do not have all of the answers.
But I do have one of the answers. Kids who ride have lives with meaning and kids who ride and train horses have even better lives.
The established horse world creates barriers to horse ownership and even access to riding by artificially increasing the cost of maintaining horses. Natural horse care not only makes horses happier and healthier, it also makes them affordable.
The established horse world has been remarkably successful at creating horses whose lives are simply a series of episodes of pain. Unfortunately it has also been remarkably successful at preventing kids whose lives are a series of episodes of pain from finding a lives with meaning in a horse lot.
