There are plans in place to tax horses out of British life. Proposed adjustments in business rates for non–residential properties — increases of up to eight times — could make vast swaths of the horsey world unviable. Life will be tough for top-end enterprises like racing yards and stud farms; it will be the end for the many riding schools and livery yards that exist on the far edge of the possible.
This is a disastrous way to carry on. The horsey life should have vast and sweeping tax exemption because it helps people to enjoy life more fully and to endure it more steadfastly. It keeps the blues away more efficiently than anything out of a bottle.
Simon Barnes and Camilla Swift join Isabel Hardman to celebrate the horsey life:
Horses are great teachers. Children who spend time around horses learn many important things. They learn that you never get love on your own terms; they learn that the pursuit of mastery is destructive to both parties. Above all they learn that understanding, forgiveness and calmness get better results than roaring and punishment.
The benefits that horses bring to people are most easily seen with the great organisation Riding for the Disabled. I’ve seen chair-bound children — children who spend their lives looking up at everybody — helped on to a horse and becoming at once tall, mobile and powerful. I have led horses for such children and seen the transformation even in a completely silent locked-in child. They fly on borrowed wings, and for half an hour they’re not just as good as the rest of us — they’re better.
Horses also teach lessons about courage. But it’s not the same sort of courage as bungee-jumping or the Cresta Run.
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