I agree with Judy's comments about the cruel treatment of horses. My experience stems from 20 years of horses as my passion and participating in many kinds of horse activities. There are very few good horse owners in existence, and I personally witnessed a lot of cruelty and abuse with regards to training methods and general handling of horses.
It did not matter what venue I was pursuing: dressage, jumping, halter classes, or cutting horses and team penning, the abuse is so ingrained into these people's lives that they don't notice it and they pass it on to their children. I witnesses countless children of perhaps 8 years of age, taking a whip to their horses to make them comply, and it's sick. The parents are on the sidelines encouraging the child to "hit him harder, make him listen, show him who's boss". I can't tell you how many times I got into fights over the way other people treated their horses, how many times I ended up in tears over a horse I could not save from an abusive owner, and how many times I was labelled a whacko. Not that I cared about being looked at strangely, I did not, but I was the strange one in most circles because I was not cruel to horses and I refused to participate or condone abusive training practices. The irony is, that despite my unwillingness to comply with "traditional" training methods, it was often my horses who won the competitions, which proved that kindness worked too.
I sold the last of my horses several years ago, and I won't ever go back to doing it again. In recent years there has been a shift in the training methods people are using, and there are several pioneers in the industry who are attempting to re-educate horsemen and women by teaching them how to bond with their horses and speak their language so that you are working with the horse's natural instincts when training them. This is resulting, finally, in the humane handling of horses by a lot of the newer upcoming riders, which is encouraging to see. However, I think it will take several generations to finally weed out the old school methods so that the majority of horse people are treating their horses with kindness.
Of course in a perfect world, nobody would own horses and they'd all run free on the range like nature intended.............but that will never be.