Thedens, that lazer story is adorable!! <3

Okay, here's my observation. I find that people in 'snark' communities such as this tend to be the smartest, funniest, and most generally awesome people on the internets. That's why I love y'all so much
But one thing that I see happening is that in animal snark communities dedicated to being against bad owners/bad care etc, people can easily go over the top and lose perspective. There can be issues where if you're not doing things in a textbook shiny double-laminated eleven star super expensive way, you are a BAD OWNER ABUSER. I knew a girl with a parrot who got reamed out because she was using a feed for it that was supposedly inferior. It was ridiculous ... the parrot was loved and cared for and healthy. It was just like ... whoa, step back and take a deep breath and realise that the feed doesn't matter that much if the animal is happy and healthy eating it. I guess it can be really easy to get sucked into being hyper critical, I mean where do you draw the line between what matters and doesn't matter? But when people go too far it can be really hard to stand against it because you can have a mob of people against you, and argueing makes you sound (and feel) like a bad owner trying to justify their badness.

This was on my mind lately in a horse context because there can be such an emphasis on having paddocks with NOTHING IN THEM THAT A HORSE COULD POSSIBLY BUMP INTO. Like reading posts where having a car in the same area as a horse was terrible... well, my horse is stuck around my barn on a diet and I was looking at our old 4WD marooned in the middle of the area because it's battery died. And I was thinking, god, I wouldn't dare to show a picture of my horse around the barn with that showing, I'd be so scared of being told off.
And then I thought, wait a minute. The 4WD doesn't have sharp rusty pieces of metal sticking out it. It doesn't have sharp edges at all, in fact. What's more, my horse is a sentient being with eyesight and an ability to walk around things - not a dodgem car! He's never walked into or even unintentionally brushed against the hibernating metal beastie - the same goes for the float, and the weird sawhorse thing sitting beside the piles of firewood, and the compost boxes, and the incinerator. Sure, it's not ideal. Sure, in a perfect world I'd have a starvation paddock for him that wasn't in the middle of "farm" activity (we live on a ten acre block). In a perfect world I'm sure I wouldn't have to bring both ponies up around the barn every night in the winter to save the paddocks either. But there's a difference between perfect and reasonable. I just think sometimes people can get too idealistically attached to perfect when they're on the internet ...

lol. I may have revealed too much. Call this a social experiment...