So, my name is Ana and I’m an 18 year old Mexican rider and also the owner of this thread: https://www.chronofhorse.com/forum/f…e-of-his-habit
On that thread I got a few messages asking why I bought the horse, my Winchester, and why i listened to my old instructor who told me to buy him (give it a read if you’re curious as to why people are confused) so I decided to explain the whole story here and to let others post their own horrible barn stories and to give tips to new riders (or experienced ones) on what to avoid when looking for a barn or a place to keep your horse. Be prepared, this is extremely long yet I summarized the worst of it.
I find it pretty hard to top my barn horror story but feel free to give it a try:
So, I started riding hunter/jumper about three years ago but I used to ride charro, mexican style western, so I knew about horses but had no idea about english horses or what types of barns they were kept at or difference in care, etc. I started out in a barn that offered beginner english riding lessons and lesson ponies/horses included, took one lesson and i decided that it seemed like a regular old barn and at first everyone was incredibly nice and kind, it also didn’t help that I only knew two places where you could ride english style and the other one was extremely expensive, and in the end I decided to stay at that barn.
In the first few weeks I started to notice that horses at that barn were extremely skinny, like from 1-5 they were at a 2 most of them, the horses were either extremely old (like 18 and up) or extremely badly behaved with the harshest bits possible (once saw a horse with a bit that purposefully had a tiny needle that hurt the horse each time it tried to open its mouth), and they were ridden 3 to 4 times a day by beginners who pulled on the reins and kicked with spurs on and not a nudge either, full on star fish kicking, and the instructor encouraged it and said that it ‘made the horses go’. When I asked about weight they said english horses had to be ‘super skinny or else they don’t jump well’ and that spurring them ‘did them good’.
I didn’t know anything about english so I assumed that most people maybe started out riding like crazy people until one day I got on my favorite horse, a little 20 year old mare named Fresa (strawberry) and she had the worst spur marks I had ever seen. She was all hurt and bleeding, it looked like they had used the rowels used in western to star fish on her, and this mare didn’t even need spurs! She was so sweet too and had the best temper any horse could have. I was about 5 months in and I was pissed so I went ahead and asked my instructor what the hell had happened to her and why my instructor had just let the kids hurt her like that. Her response? “She’s just a lesson pony, kids learn on her and the point of her is to use her like that and waste her. Stop asking questions and just ride, or are you a know it all olympian?” In the harshest tone possible, and with a lot of swear words I have avoided.
I was shocked but I didn’t want to leave the barn after being there for so long, making friends, and falling in love with this little mare Fresa and not wanting to leave her alone. I decided that maybe i was just being sensitive and shut up about it but after that incident my trainer just grew harsher and harsher which slowly revealed the horror that was my old barn.
My trainer started to curse during out lessons, our group lessons, and whenever she could. She would curse me out and make me cry by telling me how bad of a rider i was, how stupid I was, and how lucky i was to have her and not some soft trainer who wouldn’t scold me like she did and that if I ever left I would never advance. She kept most of her students in check by making them feel horrible and making them cry, which in turn made them never even think about leaving because then we would be ‘soft and delicate babies that can’t take real talk’ and they would ‘never find a trainer like her’. Most of her students were early teens or little kids so of course they weren’t able to speak up.
By the end of my first year I had started to lose my confidence and just tried to make the best of my days but then my favorite little mare Fresa had to be put to sleep because, in the middle of a lesson, she collapsed due to exhaustion and she couldn’t stand up anymore. Worst part, the kid on top of her kept spurring on and on because my instructor insisted the mare was being lazy. I had to go get that freaking kid off because Fresa was suffering so badly and my instructor yelled at me in front of everyone in the group lesson.
I didn’t ride for about a month after that before coming back and trying to switch trainers at the barn. Usually there was another trainer that helped with the students the main instructor didn’t want and immediately i loved him. He was kind but firm and I rode with him for about two months before the main instructor whined to the barn owner and the new instructor was fired. Oh, did I fail to mention that the main instructor was the barn owners wife? So yeah, she got whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted, and most new instructors didn’t last more that two months before she whined that she wanted the other instructors students and the instructor was fires. You also couldn’t ride without HER permission, not the barn owners, so riding solo wasn’t an option with lesson horses.
Eventually i thought that if I bought my own horse then maybe I could ride solo since most people who were given the chance to ride alone were those that owned horses. The second I brought this up to her she was elated and treated me like i was her favorite student, she also warned me that if she didn’t pick the horse then the horse was NOT welcomed in HER barn, but I was young, new, and naive and just went along with her. We bought my first horse Porthos and it was dreadful. He was lazy, hard to move, and it didn’t help that he was way too big for me but my trainer loved him and treated me nicely for two whole months before she started cursing at me again.
I was about a year and 5 months in when my trainer said that group lessons would now be the only thing she gave unless we wanted to pay almost double the amount because she was ‘in high demand’ at the barn. I normally always took group lessons, they weren’t that big, but after that announcement the group lessons were easily made up of about 10 to 15 people in the tiniest little arena you could imagine. There was alway accidents or some horse flipping out and frustrated because there was no space, and when jumping each one of us would jump only about twice each lesson. No one was advancing but since my trainer literally sold every kid in my lessons a super expensive horse, she got a good pay out of it, then they did well in shows because the horse did everything while the kids flapped about and were falling off almost all the time.
About a two years in I decided I was tired of Porthos, he was too lazy for me and I had already won with him a few times and just didn’t like how we fit, and I gave him to my sister who adored him. My trainer was not happy but the second I said I wanted to buy another one she was excited. We tried out about 6 different horses from different places, each one having its issues like rearing or bolting but my trainer insisted i try them because she ‘knew the owners and they raised good horses’ which really meant she wanted to sell a horse and gain contacts. Finally we tried Winchester, the horse my older thread is about, and I hated him the first time I tried him. I tried him at a show, we won 3rd place, but he was just running around the course and i had no way of stopping him.
My instructor insisted I buy him or else I wouldn’t ride anymore because she wouldn’t be helping me find any horse and she wouldn’t allow a horse she hadn’t picked to come into the barn, I was young, and I’m still young, and I didn’t want to quit riding english since I didn’t know any other barn or any one else to go to for lessons (in mexico most riding clubs are very exclusive). So in the end I bought him and, sure enough, i suffered every single day I rode him. They put him in a strong pelham and stopped feeding him correctly, he was about at a solid two out of 5 at his best and 1.5 at his worst weight, and I still couldn’t ride him without him bolting.
My old barn just started to grow worse and worse, lessons horses would just get sick and put to sleep every month while new horses, ones my trainer sold to her students, would get colic from the horrible diet they had the horses on to keep them weak enough for her riders to ride and thanks to that they coliced and died. Literally, a 7 year old gelding died a week after he arrived because he got colic from the diet. My trainer’s cursing and verbal abuse got worse and worse and she just yelled and made him feel horrible each time I rode with her on Winchester, Winchester was also getting thinner and thinner and I was beginning to hate riding once again and even thinking of quitting because I saw no way out until suddenly a miracle happened during one of our shows.
My current instructor saw me riding, or more like holding on while my horse bolted, at a show and he said he saw potential in me but I was not being taught incorrectly and only yelled at (my old instructor had a reputation of cursing out her students at the paddock). After a talk with him, some good advice and very nice comfort, I had to give what he said some thought to see if I could go with him to the barn he worked at that was apparently very good.
In the end, after two years of riding at that barn horror, I decided to take my horses and leave before they too died at that place and oh boy were we in for a ride. The second we tried to leave it all went to hell.
The old instructors went mad, saying we were leaving because we were useless (me and my sister), that we would never advance, etc etc, we are literally never welcomed back to that place. Also, getting the horses out was the hardest thing possible thanks to the fact that the barn owner refused to give us our horses’ papers. Apparently my old barn had a fame, among the riders at my new barn, of demanding to keep riders papers for 'safe keeping" then ‘losing’ documents so that the riders couldn’t leave easily or they had a difficult time leaving so we struggled until recently to recover those documents. My current trainer thankfully helped us with transport and almost smuggling the horses out before we finally arrived at our new barn. Lets just say that the day we left our old barn our old instructor started to talk sh*t about us, about how we left because she was too good for us and we couldn’t take riding seriously because we sucked, etc, etc. but until today I have yet to regret moving barns.
The second both horses, Winchester and Porthos, got to the new barn they were checked thoroughy. They got vet, dentist, farrier, and diet checked. The vet said they looked ‘malnourished’ and ‘sick’, the farrier said that the horses probably hadn’t seen a farrier in ’ a couple of months’ and had rotted hooves or thrash because of bad care from the stable hands, the dentist said that they were literally hurting themselves because of how ‘spikey’ their teeth were, and the diet check went horrible because the horses looked like they hadn’t seen a speck of grain in months.
Basically my old barn had been stealing money from us by making us pay for a farrier, extra feed, and vets while they only kept the money and did none of the care. We paid for a stable hand to care for the horses, which was recommended to us by my old instructor, and in the end the recommended stable hand had not cleaned the stalls correctly which led to all sorts of struggles. Thanks to that thrush, as explained earlier, Porthos’ hoof was too weak to hold his weight properly (he’s a percheron mix) and he ended up hurting his whole skeletal structure which made him arthritic and we had to sell him because he couldn’t even gallop anymore.
After that whole ordeal my confidence had taken a huge hit, after all the yelling my old trainer did to me its made me super conscious of the fact that I suck as a rider (I’m getting better and giving myself credit where its due) and it prevents me from doing a lot of things but slowly my current instructor is helping me out to regain that confidence.
All in all my old barn was full of red flags which I couldn’t see because I was young and naive and they manipulated us badly. My advice, be cautious out there riders because anyone will take advantage of someone new, investigate everything and anything you can before doing anything in the equestrian community.
