Horses are so expensive to maintain. Do you find lesson horses are going away?
Yes. Especially in HCOL areas.
My current trainer flat out told me (the first time I ever spoke to her!) that she doesn’t have lesson horses because it’s not economically feasible. She has a few privately owned horses she teaches beginner lessons on, but after the first few lessons she pretty much expects people to commit to a lease of some sort.
I’ve done a lot of moving over the last few years and don’t have my own horse. As a result have had to do a fair bit of barn searching. The majority of barns I have looked at do not have lesson horses. Full stop. A handful don’t have lesson horses, but do have a few available to lease.
Of the ones that do have lesson horses, I’d say at least half of them are teaching lessons on privately owned horses that the owners allow to be used for lessons, usually in exchange for reduced board. As such, the cost of the horse is offloaded onto the owner and not the barn/trainer.
I have had direct experience with 4 barns in the last 2 years that had their own lesson horses (not relying on privately owned horses to borrow). Of those, I would only keep my own horse at 2 of them. And of those two, one of them still relied on a hybrid approach - only 2-3 owned lesson horses, and the rest were privately owned. The other was a small facility (owner could DIY a lot of the work) in a LCOL area on inherited property, which I’m sure significantly reduced overhead.
The other two barns I would not go back to, and certainly wouldn’t board my own horse there. There is a 5th barn that I didn’t even have a chance to go visit, but I have heard not so great things about it.
All in all, I think my experience paints a fairly accurate picture of the current way of things. It’s expensive to have lesson horses. The only people who have them have some means of offloading the expenses, or are having to cut corners on care.
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Fortunately for me as a horseless rider I found an excellent stable near to me that has lesson horses.
Quite a few of them are outgrown/left behind because of their rider’s ambitions, horses and ponies that my riding teacher fits into her lesson program, if possible.
Since I am an experienced rider who knows how to train a horse (reward, reward, reward) I have ended up riding some that just could not become lesson horses mentally. I have ended up buying various things (far-infrared radiation pads, boots, titanium bits, Micklem bridles. as well as other tack) so I can get a good ride from them. A lot of these “left behind” horses often need just a little help to start them on their path to good citizenship as a lesson horses, I do not end up on those horses since my riding teacher has real jobs for them.
I have learned a whole lot from these lesson horse rejects that do not fit as up-down elementary lesson horses, and I am glad my riding teacher keeps them around for more advanced riders.
I LOVE my lesson stable. I am very fortunate to have found it.
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My barn still has very well-kept lesson horses that jump up to about 2’3". The barn owner has her own company independent of the barn, however, so she doesn’t need to rely on lesson money to keep them in great shape. I think that’s pretty rare.
The last few barns I’ve been at have what posters above have mentioned — a few beginner horses, but then you’re expected to lease or buy.
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Not in Calgary……we have a waiting list for people to take lessons! (As do all the other batns) The barn I’m at currently has 14 schoolies . We have a few that jump 2ft9 but most are kept smaller than that and we have a couple in their 20s! We adore our schoolies, all are well kept, injected when needed etc, and are always on the lookout for new ones but around here they are hard to find, we have lots of lesson barns and when you find good ones we don’t let them go! In addition to our 14 school horses, we also have about 24 lease and owned horses.
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I know 3 trainers in New England who have recently given up their school horses, and will only teach people who already own or lease a horse. Lessons on school horses are already hard to find, and this does not help.
It seems like the ways to get into the horse community are going away. The focus is shifting more and more to those who are already in the community, and have financial resources to move up.
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My barn still has a string of lesson horses. They are either horses their original owners outgrew, or horses that got sold on to younger kids until the horses were too old to compete, do the harder job, etc. They are pretty well-cared for, though not as well if they were privately owned. But it amazes me how many parents complain about the cost ($60) when the student is provided a safe horse, saddle/bridle/pad, grooming tools along with the lesson. When I took dressage lessons from a VERY good instructor, not a well-known, but a true horseman, his lessons on a schooled horse cost $150. And that was over ten years ago!
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Keeping lessons horses just isn’t a feasible option for the most part. I can’t charge $90-$100 for a lesson, but that’s what it would take to cover their costs. People are charging $45-60 for lessons in my area still, and I’d lose my entire client base if I went up that high. I have my one personal horse that I will teach the occasional lesson on, but I strictly teach mobile lessons to clients who lease or own their own horse. Less overhead, less work, less worry.
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There are still barns with a large string of school horses in the Edmonton area too, but these aren’t typically fancy horses, and you have to moderate your expectations of how far a lesson horse program will take you. Barns (including my own) are having a heck of a time replacing school horses though.
What was quite surprising, is how much of a market (sales) there is for the older, ready to semi retire horses, that used to not have much of a market and would be loaned, or sold affordably, to lesson programs instead. I suppose it is good that these old horses are appreciated, but it does make it harder to fill the need for school horses.
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Where I am, at least some barns have a strong lesson-horse program. Most do not, but there are some.
It seems to be much harder to find true ready-for-lessons horses.There seem to be fewer of the BTDT horses available as lesson horses. And more horses that have incomplete training, , and/or have a behavioral and/or chronic soundness Problem. Some are just slotted into lessons anyway with hopes for the best.
The horses that used to be available after plodding around with a citizen-rider for many years and now passively trotting around in a lesson program are vanishingly scarce.
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The barn that I’m at in Ontario still has a lesson string. An assortment of bombproof ponies, a couple ottb’s who the more experienced rider’s hop on when they don’t have a lease or horse of their own to ride. A couple older horses who the barn took on when the owner’s stopped riding or went to University. Then there’s a few who are owned by boarder’s and either get used in a lesson or two a week, or a part-boarded to a lesson kid.
Eventually most of the kids graduate from the lesson program to leasing or part-boarding a horse or pony that’s available on property, or they buy their own.
The barn is unique in that they have someone who runs the lesson program and does daycamp, with the idea that those kids (or adults) eventually move up to lesson with the BO/trainer who shows on the A’s and is currently competing in the GPs on his homebred mare.
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There are still a decent number of barns in my area that have lesson horses, including where I ride. My trainer has a large network which makes it easier to bring in appropriate horses (sometimes just temporarily or to try out to see if they work, sometimes on a long term free lease, sometimes bought, etc) and also to find homes when they are ready to be retired from lessons. But if things continue the way they are, I can definitely see barns with lesson horses becoming less and less economically feasible. I’ve already thought a bit about what I’ll do when my trainer eventually retires, because buying a horse is out of reach for me. I may lease something to trail ride once or twice a week.
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Here’s what I wonder.
Someone pointed out above that people wouldn’t pay $100+/lesson, which is what it would take to support a schoolie. I wonder if that’s true. Obviously it would limit the field, but there are lots of wealthy families out there who want Little Suzie to start riding lessons…even at $100 a pop, I would wager to guess.
If the horse could give 4-5 lessons per week at $100/lesson, then that would be a viable business model, would it not? (IF the horse stays sound, which is always a big IF).
ETA: I get that, in this model, the trainer is making beans for their time teaching. It’s more of a customer acquisition strategy in that some of these kids would eventually lease/buy their own horses.
When I was a kid the horses did more than a one hour lesson a day.
My question is how trained do horses who are ridden by lesson kids stay if a better rider doesn’t routinely hop on to remind them to stay trained.
Further, If the horse gets ridden poorly, primarily, they also lose fitness which is key to soundness.
It certainly ain’t easy.
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Back in the day, this was a job for the older kids/barn rats. But you raise a good question, because for the most part, I don’t see barn rats anymore. At least at my barn, the kids come, ride their horses, and leave. I’ve asked many of them to ride my horse when I travel for work, and I’m often turned down because they’re so busy with other things.
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I wonder about this too. Not saying the lesson program I was in as a teen/tween was ideal, but the school horses were in 2 lessons a day, 5 days a week, and often used for trail rides on the 6th day. Most lessons except for true beginners included some jumping of low courses, gymnastics, etc up to 2’6". Project/sales horses had no more than 1 lesson a day. Everyone got Mondays off. Lessons on the trail instead of the arena were a regular thing and made the program really special. I have no doubt that if I time-traveled back, I’d find some of those horses were unsound, but for the most part they handled the workload fine. Most of them were lesson horses for years. The ponies were all barefoot, as were the sturdier horses. The whole herd lived out in a huge dry lot with a generous supply of alfalfa hay, but no grain unless they were hard keepers.
What changed?
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I was that barn rat.
And I learned so much from it too.
Let’s not forget the limitation of today’s world, the liability of having unpaid barn rats working with big animals prone to moments of nonsense that can get people and kids hurt, largely unsupervised…
.
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I find lesson programs are going away. They are being replaced by training programs. The difference being the former caters to clientele that may be beginning in this industry and/or do not have a horse. The latter caters towards individuals established in the industry that own a horse or lease a horse.
In many of the barns local to me that shift happened decades ago. Most of the serious competition barns (eventing/dressage) around me do not have lesson horses. The trainer/instructor may have a personal horse that is available to fill in if a client’s horse is lame or out of commission, but it seems to be expected in my area of the woods that you lease the horse you ride.
I am very fortunate I can keep my horses at home, because otherwise I would have been priced out of the industry a long time ago.
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This is how the (eventing) barn that I’m at operates. My trainer has a couple of people who don’t lease who will borrow boarder or one of her personal horses for occasional lessons, but those individuals are people who were boarders for a long time and no longer have their own horses (the primary case I’m thinking of, the horse was sold due to the owner having some medical issues). My trainer also told me that her liability insurance premium is significantly lower because she doesn’t keep lesson horses and 98% of the rides on the property by people who aren’t her are boarders riding their own horses.
The barn I left in January has a full lesson string (all but two horses in that barn are owned by the barn owner or her mother, and one of those two is still used in lessons a few times a week) and her schedule is absolutely packed. There’s actually a decent number of lesson programs in my area, but it’s also fairly LCOL, you can get a decently-sized amount of land for cheap within 45 minutes of the city, and there’s a lot of local hay which keeps those costs down, so the math works out a bit differently here than a lot of other major metropolitan areas. Nobody around here is rich from running a lesson program, but it’s certainly doable in a way that it isn’t in a lot of other places.
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I think that “The Equine Industry” that a lot of us knew as youngsters 50 years ago is dying. Barn rat children, whose free or nearly free labour isn’t possible any more. Because of the insurance necessary, feed costs and real estate values. Costs for the barn owner have increased so much at the same time to simply price a lot of the “base” of our sport out of reach for most families. The only people who can afford what it costs are the rich, and those folks don’t want their kids exploited for free as barn rats. Besides, kids don’t see horses as something attractive any more… they’d rather have their own cell phone, and post videos on tik toc for fun, then everyone is surprised when bad things happen. Society has moved on from what many of us knew as our formative years. And the Equine Industry is a casualty. The majority of the population now lives in cement towers, in boxes in the sky, or boxes in a line on the street, in the city which functions as a human factory farm, and only see horses in picture books and movies. Our society has moved on from what it was decades ago, and people’s desires and interests have changed.
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