Just because someone is on TV does not mean they are an "expert"... bear with me for a moment... climbing on the soap box to share my humble two cents...
Going off the thread a moment... in 2003 my dog tore out my MCL in a collision and I was hostage on the couch in early May while the first doctor misdiagnosed a severe grade III tear right off the bone... and I was watching a LOT of TV... including Animal Planet shows and going through physical therapy that failed. The PA supervising me yelled at me after nine weeks and said "I have never,in 20 years, had an MCL not heal. You are doing something wrong!" I told him, no, maybe you are and got a second opinion. Turns out the MCL was torn clean off the bone and healed hanging like a blind cord... unstable and blowing in the breeze.
I have been involved with horses for, uh, 40 years (yeah, guess that makes me OLD but still a student!!!) and with miniature horses for 20+ years... showed, trained, bred and worked for two of the top breeders in NY state back in the day and even had some of my own minis give me dystocias to solve and training problems to get through (and I still don't know it all and never will).
There was a show called "That's My Baby" and they featured a lady and her daughter and their very pregnant mini mare. Not to fault anyone's training style but riding a heavily pregnant mare and chasing her with a dog to "speed things up" as the lady said right there for the world to hear... including putting a new foal and mom out with a yearling colt (sibling) who chased the new baby in an aggressive fashion (ears back and cocky, aggressive stance of a adolescent male) and factual discrepancies on the AMHA and AMHR breed registries caused me to heat up a bit and call Discovery Channel to whine and complain.
Despite the factual discrepancies (which I read verbatim from my rule books) Discovery personnel said they could not pull the show as "it had been airing for a year." I told them that people watch Discovery and Animal Planet to learn things and providing shoddy horsemanship and questionable horse care was not what I would find a good lesson to learn." I told them I would mail them the data and they could do with it as they wished... they did edit the show a bit but not the glaring error of chasing a pregnant prey animal with a predator or showing the baby getting hung up in a water hose that was around his neck... or riding the heavily pregnant mare at a good clip... my pregnant girls here were on maternity leave for 7 months of the 11 it takes to grow a foal.
I was so fuming mad (and now facing extensive surgery to repair the misdiagnosis on the MCL)that I contacted a lady who was on a different show on AP... vented a bit and the end result was a show on our miniature mare Mercy and her service work in our community. We corrected some of the "discrepancies" and I was in line to be filmed for the same show that had the errors but they went on "hiatus" and they missed the opportunity to see what happens when a mini foal born in a 16 degree Fahrenheit snowstorm is a dwarf and what has to be done to save it. "Connie" will be 6 on April 4th... outliving the life span of many dwarf mini horses along with her more severely affected half brother, celebrating his 6th birthday on Sunday. I gelded the sire and I discontinued my breeding program.
So, my off thread though is this... anyone who "thinks" he or she is an "expert" on animals is misguided. Some people may have more opportunities to interact with animals but animals ALWAYS have lessons to teach us... and I am constantly reminded of that every day I wake up to work with them.
Just my two cents... and sorry for my off thread story but I know I am learning from my rabbits every day, even though I have had rabbits since the early nineties...each day we have a lesson to learn.
Denise