Talk:United States Equestrian Federation

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There is a major controversy that is never mentioned at all in this page.

USEF is now a minority organization; the majority of show horses in the USA no longer participate in USEF.

In recent years, the American Quarter Horse, along with many of the other Western breeds (Paint, Pinto, etc.), split off from USEF. They wrote their own set of rules, set up their own Judge recognition program, and started their own drug testing & show supervision program. These breeds are, numerically, the largest in America, and have the largest series of horse shows.

This was a major blow to USEF, since the size of these breeds & the number of exhibitors meant that the majority of USEF's members & member shows left. With most of them leaving, this put a big financial hole in the USEF budget.

As I understand it, the reasons for the split were financial and attention. Financially, AQHA members felt that the membership dues and fees USEF charged were excessive in relation to what services they provided to AQHA members & shows. For example, USEF collects a drug fee from every horse at every recognized show, but AQHA members felt that they seldom saw USEF drug testers at their shows, the testers mostly went to shows of breeds like Saddlebreds & Arabians. They felt they were paying most of the fees, but those fees were spent on other breeds.

Attention-wise, AQHA members felt that they received little attention from USEF, despite being the largest part of the membership. They thought that disciplines like Dressage, Eventing & Jumping received most of USEF's attention, and they were comparatively neglected. So they split.

It would be difficult to go into the details of this without getting a lot of back-and-forth arguments, and losing the Neutral Point of View. But this was a major incident in USEF history, and it remains a major fact about USEF today. It seems like it ought to be at least mentioned in the article.

Remember to sign your posts! <grin>

My take is that while on one hand it's true there are a lot of groups in the western color breeds that left, that's really the only group that bailed recently, even though in numbers of horses it was certainly noticed. But--and this is also significant--the AQHA itself actually left a VERY VERY long time ago--they were gone when I started showing in the early 1970's and that particular angle on the controversy has been dead for years. I think they may have still contracted some of the drug testing stuff with USEF (then AHSA) and that may not be happening any more (not sure on that part), but AQHA has had their own judges and rules for decades. The loss of the Paint, Pinto and Appaloosa crowd is more recent. The split between a reining division with USEF and the NHRA is yet another "political" issue.

On the other hand, USEF also evolved to become the single entity responsible for the US Olympic Equestrian team, incorporating the old USET. They also have added more of the smaller "new" breeds like the Andalusian, Paso Fino, and Friesian.

My take on the issue is that USEF had a rough few years in the past decade as it shifted from the old AHSA to the new USEF. But things appear to have settled out. It now does some things differently from what it used to do. It seems to be becoming more a "discipline" organization than a "breed" organization. The remaining breeds all have their own breed associations and most breed shows have some kind of dual approval...mostly because they all still want to have USEF do their drug testing and judge certification, I suspect.

As far as "minority" organization, the AQHA is the 10,000,000 pound gorilla in any grouping and skews any other analysis. I mean, you could as easily say that all other horse breeds in the USA are "minority" breeds...you can't turn around without tripping on a quarter horse these days...their registrations are up 53% over the last 10 years while everyone else in the industry is tanking...but that's a different issue. The AQHA does anything it wants, it is big enough to afford to do so.

I think that if there is POV in the existing article, it could be replaced with accurate statistics--I haven't really looked. But as far as visiting the "political" stuff, I think that's a can of worms that doesn't really need to be in an encyclopedia. We COULD do like they do with the Equestrian at the Summer Olympics page and create a chart of all the breeds and disciplines that ever were a part of AHSA/USEF, noting on the chart the years a given breed was added or left, but that's more work than I feel up to doing, personally, but maybe a good project if someone wanted to tackle it... Montanabw 21:30, 24 January 2007 (UTC)