Im glad everyone has gave their honest opinion and i didnt want my comments to become personnal in any way.
You didn't mean to be personal in any way, but then you go on to say:
And secondly i know that the person who this is directed at has said a few things that were not true.
If this topic was directed at a specific person, then you were being personal.
I just want fairness and i was just trying to find out more. If the miniature societies are to grow in ireland we need stability and fair structure i can see how everyone is linked to each other...
You see that everyone is linked together because these winning horses came from the same farm/breeding, and so that link is unfair politics. Keep in mind it's possible that it isn't politics at all, maybe it's just that this particular line of horses has that extra something that the judges like, no matter who is showing the horse. I, of course, know nothing about which show is which or who won what championship with how many entries, or what any of your horses look like, but I do know there is one thing to keep in mind:
No matter how good your horse is, there's always a horse out there that is better, at least in someone's eyes--if that someone happens to be the judge of the day, your horse is going to get beat.
I have to say your initial post reminds me of a particular girl that was in my 4-H group many years ago. At our club achievement day one year I took a horse that at 7 a.m. was FILTHY, and I cleaned him up without bathing him (it was a cold windy day at the show ground had only outdoor washracks with icy cold water) I used a lot of Dri-Klean and a lot of elbow grease, and by the time I went into the ring for the grooming class at 10 a.m. my horse was SPOTLESS. There wasn't a speck of dust left on him--in those days the judge still used the white glove test, and that glove came away WHITE. I won the class, hands down. Another girl, who did not place, was mad--she went to the leaders & said I had cheated (I never did figure out how she figured that; just that I beat her, therefore I must have cheated I guess??) It was really pretty funny, because if you looked at her horse you could see the dust sitting on the horse's back. I was standing right there whens he patted the horse on his hip--and got a cloud of dust. There was no doubt in her mind that she deserved to win the grooming class, yet to everyone else her horse was still dirty. Often "politics" and "unfair" is all in the eye of the beholder.
I've come out of the ring annoyed because I got beat by a horse that I felt shouldn't have won (can we say head-bobbing lame??) and yes, actually I have been in classes that I won, and came out of the ring with a puzzled look on my face, because I knew I didn't deserve to win. There was one show where I won every class I went out in--the only one I didn't win was the open halter championship, and my mom was handling the winning horse that time out. I even took a friend's mare out in the broodmare class, and came out with 1st place...with a mare I thought was gosh-awful. I never did know if the judge truly liked our horses best of the show, or if we won so much because of the fact that we'd bought a horse trailer from that particular judge the previous year. About the time I picked up my ribbon with that broodmare I did figure it was politics, in my favor, yet later I found out from another party that a competitor in that class had told him about the lovely Morgan mare that won the broodmare class. So, the mare that I thought didn't deserve to win was, according to someone else --that got beat by the mare-- and was not at all affiliated with the mare's owner was more than deserving of that first place ribbon. Maybe it wasn't politics at all?
