Are the days of lesson horses over?

[findeight]

Certifying all trainers of beginner riders sounds great but…who would do that? What would it cost and who would pay? How much of that would make beginner lessons more expensive? Who would force beginner trainers to participate? There are certification programs for trainers involved with USHJA but no requirement they participate.

What gets me about hovering parents is they focus on tiny details and ignore checking references, qualifications and teaching ability of said beginner trainers, often putting price on top of the list. Which I get but ignoring safety does not justify affordability.

Far as what parents are afraid might happen to older unsupervised minors? Just keeping this restricted to sports related activity? Theres an awful lot of sports parents out there who wish they had been there, paid more attention and not trusted the coaches. Plus wish they had not ever assumed it would never happen their child or their child was to smart to fall for it.

[OverandOnward]

More than once I’ve looked for a ‘lesson’ program – for me. That is, an instructor who had suitable horses for me to ride and take lessons, dressage and jumping. Nothing elevated or fancy. I would not need to own a horse.

Struck out both times. Did take a few lessons, but the horses were wobbly-limpy and just not up to speed. I wasn’t asked and didn’t say so as both instructors had decades in the industry, but I thought those horses needed to be out at pasture, not hobbling around a lesson ring.

Quit looking after that. Eventually I did buy a horse.

[Peggy]

@Limerick

May I ask what state you are in? And how I wish USHJA would start a program to certify trainers to teach introductory lessons!

They do have this.
https://www.ushja.org/education/recognized-riding-academy

[Peggy]

Not unusual for horses I’ve seen in lesson programs to do two, or occasionally three, lessons a day, six days a week, though some are walk and trot only.

As far as the tuning, the assistant who does the lessons may ride one occasionally, the horse might be part-leased to a more experienced rider who does the tuning, or the more advanced students “tune.”

[wsmoak]

There is a successful lesson program nearby that runs more or less as a monthly subscription. There is a fixed cost and a lesson time. If it’s raining, then the lesson is indoors. It’s affiliated with Pony Club so “unmounted lessons” are a thing and nobody complains about missed rides. Past that you can officially half- or full-lease a horse or pony once you are deemed competent to ride without the instructor present. But you don’t have to lease, and if you want to skip a month or stop for a while and pick back up, that is fine.

I think it works well because the ponies have to eat regardless of whether the person shows up for their lesson, and the instructor does not have to manage make-up lessons. (Unless we’re having a hurricane or something, then of course things get rescheduled.)

[Guyot]

I’ve been in this business for 21 years and for the first time am without a lesson horse. With all the rising costs the extra horses and fickle clients who do weekly lessons are enough to break me financially after the last couple of years.

I do have one upper level schoolmaster left but he is leased so not on my bill and will be retired when the lease is done. First time since I was in college that I’ve only had one horse myself. Having just these two is such a relief… I can’t imagine what it would feel like to have just one!!

I retired my lesson pony back to his owners farm last fall. Broke my heart as he was with me for 15 years (and knew him 5 years before that teaching him thru PC), but he was slowing down and still sound at 28 so it was the right thing to do. He never pulled in enough $ to cover his costs but he was perfect and kind and I never had to worry about teaching on him. I toyed with keeping him for my granddaughter but she is just 1year old and maintaining him just isn’t worth the expense unfortunately.

My one beginner horse we put down last fall as well. She was older and starting to really struggle and needed daily pain meds, I was worried about her getting up in the ice and snow so made the decision.

It a brave new world to have no lesson horses to build a client base if I loose a couple of my current clients all of whom are in full training program, but I can’t keep bleeding money to support horses for others to ride.

Currently trying to build a haul in lesson group outside my sport of dressage. Have a few eventers so far and hopefully will be able to get more so I can have a few clients that lesson with me weekly that are not stabling on my farm. I really don’t want more then I have (16 horses) as labor is hard to find, not to mention stressful.

I truly am grateful that I’ve been able to live my dream of being a professional for as long as I have but I’m watching and waiting to put in my exit plan when I have to. I do think the industry is going to fail for all but the very rich or go back to back yard situations… either way I will be pushed out. Middle of the road GP dressage trainers will be obsolete.

[BroncoMo]

Well that’s interesting. I joined the military when I was 17

[cyanskies]

While these things are frightening, they are still vanishingly rare. You should be much more afraid of the drive to school than of being harmed by a school shooting.

By basically ALL measures, the world is much safer and less violent than it ever has been in the past. Anyone trying to convince you otherwise is fearmongering. (Of course, this is a very broad trend - specific, individual circumstances may be worse today than in the past.)

I remember being left alone for short periods quite a bit younger than 8 with no problem at all. Kids today are much less mature than previous generations, though.

[ShenanAnna]

It was a large article, with photographs, and I don’t remember the WP “endorsing” anything, just reporting.

[vxf111]

Are these employers unwilling or unable to train their employees in the protocol? How hard is it to tell employees to knock on the door or go in through the gate? To train them on how to handle a situation when it’s unclear whether the customer is home? Does the employer just assume the employee will figure it out and then leave the employee to flounder after the employee demonstrates a need for guidance? Why?

I don’t know what’s going on here but it sounds like no small part of the problem is mismanagement by the employer.

[Pokerface]

@cyanskies

While these things are frightening, they are still vanishingly rare. You should be much more afraid of the drive to school than of being harmed by a school shooting.

By basically ALL measures, the world is much safer and less violent than it ever has been in the past. Anyone trying to convince you otherwise is fearmongering. (Of course, this is a very broad trend - specific, individual circumstances may be worse today than in the past.)

I remember being left alone for short periods quite a bit younger than 8 with no problem at all. Kids today are much less mature than previous generations, though.

You clearly work (or worked) in a very different setting than a school teacher. School shootings are a VERY real and present danger in today’s classrooms. In my 15 years of teaching (I have since left), the presence of school shootings increased yearly. I remember vividly when Columbine happened (I was in high school) and each year we have more and more school shootings. This is not fear-mongering, we didn’t have mass shootings like this 30 years ago. In addition to school shootings (which I thankfully never had to deal with), schools have parents and students who bring weapons in to school. We have bomb threats, and we do have lost and abducted kids. When I was teaching, I would come up with plans for what I would do should my students be in danger, where would I hide them? How would I get them to safety? I am NOT an anxious or reactive person, but the reality is there. To claim otherwise is ignorant.

So far as the conversation, my barn has lesson ponies and horses. Most are leased, but will be used for other lessons when appropriate. My own horse I allow to be used for lessons when I cannot get out to ride. We have “barn rats” who are around most of the time and can be relied on to help tack up, grab a horse from the field, and generally be available when they are not in school. Since we have a lot of kids, it’s not always the same kids on the same day, but they are around. As a result, they do get offered extra rides by the trainers and boarders.

[OverandOnward]

@cyanskies

By basically ALL measures, the world is much safer and less violent than it ever has been in the past.

Statistically, yes.

But the targets and victims have changed. True or not, it used to seem that if you weren’t involved in certain neighborhoods and activities, you didn’t have much to worry about. But now the evil has come hunting in places that never had these problems before.

This is an age when school children and workplaces are conducting training for active shootings, even in small towns. With follow-up reminders. With wall signs “in the event of an active shooter”.

AND more people and acquaintances than we would like are having to use that training in a real incident. Businesses and schools have realized that they can’t afford to take the position “it can’t happen here”. It has happened in places that it was never expected before. It has happened in many small businesses although that doesn’t make the news as much.

It’s actually happening so often that most incidents no longer make the national news. There isn’t enough news time to cover them all. And even those that are covered can be overshadowed by the next incident a week later (Buffalo grocery store followed within days by Uvalde elementary school).

I used to think ‘statistically this is highly unlikely for any individual’. It also used to be that if you lived in small-medium sized communities (most Americans) it didn’t happen here.

Now it happens here. In 2018 when the school shooting killed 10 and wounded 13 in Santa Fe, Texas, not terribly far from where I live, is when my brain just stopped. Santa Fe, TX is population less than 13,000. The high school has less than 1,500 total students. It is one of the least noticeable and least memorable places on earth. If that can happen in Santa Fe, it can truly happen anywhere.

And did. What on earth had the elementary students in Uvalde done to attract a school shooter.

Every school kid over about 10 years old, and every college kid, that has spoken when the subject came up has said that they know the safest way out of any classroom. They say that cheerfully, it is part of their daily life. And if they can’t get out, they have a basic plan for what to do to be as safe as possible in place.

I don’t know if this is what has today’s parents hovering over their children, though.

[vxf111]

I don’t understand why this has to be a boomer/non boomer thing. If employees can’t be trained to do the job effectively, either the training isn’t sufficient or the employee isn’t cut out for the job and needs to be let go. I don’t know why these employers need to make it a generational thing. If it was an older worker who was behaving the same way would it somehow be different? It sounds like an excuse to do one of those “kids these days” gripes rather than take some responsibility for training or hiring. If they can’t find employees who are capable of knocking on doors and opening gates, something is wrong with the way they’re hiring or what they’re paying. Because I assume you inability to open gates and knock on doors is not some broad generational knowledge gap. I teach. I have seen decades of students come up through the years. They are not fundamentally different from each other, despite all the grousing about generational differences.

[vxf111]

@OverandOnward

There. Is. No. One. Else. To. Hire.

Where are all these bootstrappy boomers and why don’t they get off their keisters and do the work then

Honestly. It sounds like a lot of griping about an issue that just requires some better communication and training. Like an actual written protocol for what you do when you get to someone’s house and they’re not obviously home.

Instead of bitching and moaning about “kids these days,” how about getting to the root cause of what the issue is?

Maybe customers should leave their gates open if they need the lawn mown? Maybe they should put a note on the door if they’re not available to answer? Maybe the employer could manage this experience a bit better so as not to create problems?

I don’t know what job these employees are doing once they get inside but if they’re capable of doing the job and labor is so short, why wouldn’t the employer do what it takes to get them capable of doing the whole JOB rather than bitching and moaning about it?

Honestly. I call BS that this is some widespread problem. It sounds like there’s an employee or two who is a little shy/uncomfortable and the employer has decided to take the “high road” and complain about that employee to customers rather than have an actual sit down with the employee and work through the problem.

Or this job doesn’t pay well enough for employees to care and they just go elsewhere.

Most employers who bitch about employees need to look inward because that’s often where (at least in part) the problem lies.

[akhunterrider]

I live in Kansas and I’m fortunate to ride at a barn with a healthy lesson horse program and lots of school horses. However, it’s also one of the only programs of its size in the area, so it also hosts Pony Club and the local college’s IHSA team.

I do believe there is a lot of demand for programs like this one and unfortunately not enough places that have them.

I have been riding for 25+ years and I’m very grateful for this program, however, I am stuck in a weird spot. While I would love to lease, I don’t have the budget for it. I have two small children and lots of other household bills and it’s just not a possibility. I want to show at 2’6", but I can’t without leasing. So I’m in the process of trying to choose the option that best fits my needs. I could afford to half lease, but the options are much fewer for that. And because of aforementioned children and a full time job, I don’t really have the ability to work at the barn to offset costs.

[Impractical_Horsewoman]

I had the joys of having to do numerous long-put-off home improvement projects this summer, and most companies would either text right before the technician arrived or email me to give a fairly exact time of arrival beforehand. If it was uncertain if I’d be there, I’d confirm permission to enter. I’ve never heard of that problem before, and it sounds to me that something is going on at the company. Maybe the one parallel I see at some barns is I have met barn owners who are poor communicators, and then get very upset if their (unclear) instructions are followed or they just don’t offer adequate equipment to the staff or make things unnecessarily hard (like broken wheelbarrows or muck heaps that require pushing a barrow uphill). Sometimes managers aren’t good at creating a system to make work easy.

However, companies are short-staffed, for sure, and, I hate to say it, a lot of it is the fact that many of them got along with paying very low wages, and without raising pay, it’s just not enough to incentivize people to work for them, or if they do, the employees feel little loyalty and quickly leave for higher wages.

I think there is some truth with barns–some barns got along with having kids work for free, boarders pitching in, and a patchwork of people who would come and go, and people just don’t have the time and inclination to work for next-to-nothing. If they’re doing it because they love horses, the position has to offer some additional incentive, like quality training. And costs of living are going up all over.

[OverandOnward]

@vxf111

Most employers who bitch about employees need to look inward because that’s often where (at least in part) the problem lies.

OK you know everything. I should just go back and delete those posts. It all wandered away from the topic anyway.

Never mind. Sorry I answered the question.

[vxf111]

Can we just call a truce? As you note, it’s a tangent to the thread and neither of us is the employer at issue anyway so we’re both looking at this from the outside anyway.

[AllisonWunderlund]

Which is problematic given the lack of suitable lesson horses that can be used for IEA, which is what the organization counts on. I fear IEA is in danger of outgrowing the available resources.

[clanter]

@OverandOnward

But the targets and victims have changed. True or not, it used to seem that if you weren’t involved in certain neighborhoods and activities, you didn’t have much to worry about. But now the evil has come hunting in places that never had these problems before.

not anywhere near on topic for this thread but you should read about the 1927 Bath School disaster,( also known as the Bath School massacre)