Yes, but they don’t certify the trainers so they can go out and teach. They said they were organizing a program to certify beginner instructors but I have not heard anything more. I emailed them to ask.
It is an opinion piece and quite poorly written IMHO. The writer has cherry picked cases where police/CPS get involved. Her kids were allowed to play and walk home from a park a mile from their home. They were 10 and 6. The police showed up.
That is too young in my opinion especially if the park was on a busy road. I always thought you had to provide supervision of children until they are ten.
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Oh yes, the controversy around the “free range” children waking home from a park in Maryland. That was quite a few years ago.
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where to begin here- as a parent of a teen who took lessons, then leased, then owned, I feel like I can comment.
I think there is a way for lesson programs to survive but its tricky and some luck is needed. The big problem I’ve experienced at a couple medium sized lesson barns is the owner/trainer needs to be good at a lot of things. Training, horse care, running a business, running a barn, and dealing with kids/parents/adults. This is a lot.
The best barn workers IMO are young adults who ride or board at their barn. Use these people, let them pay off their rides by working.
A modern day version of barn rats still exists and kids can be helpful with proper guidance and supervision. My kid did it, was super valuable for her. For years we had a group of kids that carpooled to the barn, spent the day helping out weekends or summer days, and an older teen or one of the parents would supervise. You can have multiple kids, rotate parents if needed to supervise. Sometimes you can even pay a barn worker to ‘babysit’. These kids can then get priority for camps, events, shows, lease horses… you don’t have to pay them with lessons or rides necessarily.
Parents are a valuable resource for many things- we will muck stalls, we will buy things for our favorite lesson horses, we will do what we can to make the barn a better place. Take advantage of this.
With how expensive horses costs are now, many clients are happy to allow their horses to be used for lessons occasionally if the trainer is considerate of the owner.
In our area, IEA is alive and well. There are lots of teams and if you don’t have the horses and facilities to host, you can join another barn who can to cohost. You do have to bring a couple horses if you cohost but for our region it seems to work.
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On the generational thing: there is quite a lot of research out there about the different generations and what appeals to them. In my field (association work) we get this a lot and actually do quite a lot of education on the topic—which, as you note, is not to slag the younger gen but more to help the older management/owner generation to “understand” the younger ones and treat them more fairly—so they can offer the perks necessary to retain the quality staff they have. So much more about flexibility, time off, “quality of life,” etc is valued by the younger gens. It’s not good or bad, but it IS different.
As for lesson horses, it’s very difficult to maintain a lesson horse properly on what it brings in. And it is difficult for a trainer to buy a lesson horse in general, when a good lesson type is easily going to run you low five figures.
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In the US we too have wait lists but we can afford to keep lesson horses like we once did.
Totally agree as this is a common practice in my area. I witnessed a barn I worked at piss off a few (probably more that I didn’t hear of) lesson horse owners, but they actually never had a shortage of lesson horses that were free leased out to them.
Main problems I witnessed here were A) horses worked too often. Started out great, but then the BO got greedy and this caused issues with these horses, particularly the ones being jumped several times a day and week. B) Did NOT listen to the horse owner’s wants unless they were constantly present. I remember one lady paid for chiro for her horse. The horse was used the very next day for a schooling show (actually by me because I jumped in last minute). I HAD NO CLUE the horse had chiro the previous day and was shocked when I found the instructor did not consider this. The owner was rightfully PEEVED as the horse started bucking probably due to a sore back! She came with a trailer later that day and took the horse back. C) Lack of keeping the horse’s well trained/ would allow horses to get bad manners (kicking, biting etc).
I think new lesson barns need to almost have a schooling/training type program. There is no shortage of riders hoping to find situations to learn further about horse care and independent riding, but there is on expenses! Have the more mature riders be taught how to re-school lesson horses (like a working student, but more so as an apprentice) and keep them going consistently. Teach them about vet care and assign them a horse to care for. Get them to start a log book to write down what they are doing with the horse, time spent, any injuries etc they may notice to alert the BO about. Maybe even a lease to learn type situation coordinated by the BO at a discounted rate? A mentorship program with a younger rider paired with the mature rider after a while to help and learn? Just ideas.
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This is an age-old problem. In my first job out of college, in 1979, I was part of a group of brand new college grads hired following an expansion of the agency I went to work for. One of my supervisors told me that they just did not understand us young people. They were especially baffled by the fact that we seemed to value time over money and had no idea how to effectively punish/reward us.
In response to the original question, yes, the days of lesson horses are definitely over in most places. Increasing costs of everything (land, infrastructure, horses, employees, hay, feed, taxes…) are making it impossible to continue to maintain lesson strings in many parts of the country.
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I’d like to see some data/sources on that. Violence has always existed, in all communities, regardless of location or affluence. But now that we have a 24/7 news cycle, and cell phones with excellent video quality and connection to the internet, it’s a lot harder to sweep these things under the rug.
Anyone who took the position that “it can’t happen here” was simply ignorant and incorrect. It can happen anywhere, and has been happening anywhere, for a long time. School shootings make the news because they’re a particularly heinous and egregious kind of violence, but ultimately, they cause a statistically extremely small number of deaths compared to… just about everything else you can die from.
I understand being afraid; we can’t control our emotional reactions to information. But humans are not built for understanding miniscule probabilities. We make our risk assessments based on how quickly things come to mind, not how dangerous they actually are.
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I remember that story - that’s when they came up with “free range” children. When I was in first grade, I walked to school with my older sister she was 8 I was 6. the school was probably 3/4 of a mile from our house. Moved to Panama, all of us kids played - while normalll there was a pod of us my sister and friends were the oldest - age 9 I was 7. When my dad was stationed in California, that’s where we got our first horse and pony. Mom would drop us off at the barn and we’d stay all day - barely supervised since the barn was run by a few marines. We’d go out on trail rides - bareback! no helmet, and in the summer tennis shoes won over boots. Mom was on the golf course, dad in Vietnam. Now we were on military bases where I guess there was a stronger sense of safety but - hours long trails w/o adults with the oldest being 10 or 11 and a few of us 8,9 lol. My mom would surely be in jail today.
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Back on topic - lesson horses. I’m in the Washington DC area and there are couple of pretty good lesson barns in the area, plus some others. I’ve a couple of friends who keep a couple of their hunt horses at barns w/ lesson programs. This area is a pretty densely populated area so the lesson barns seem to do pretty well, and I think they found a good compromise between being a lesson barn and a “show” barn. Way back when I first started showing and being part of some riding clubs a couple of the shows we ran had “riding academy hunter” I loved that division - just for horses/ponies in a bonafide lesson barn. A few years ago i wanted to resurrect that division for a new local schooling show series and was shot down. “kids would be embarrassed” by it. It didn’t have to be called “riding academy” but something just for schoolies. Nothing makes me smile more than a saintly pony or horse taking good care of its riders-. I recall seeing a BNR/Olympian sending his daughter off cross country on her pony - OMG cutest little sparkplug of a pony…
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Yes, they are going away. One medium vet bill and that horse is a liability. And, in this economy, riders have to step up and foot the cost. All horses deserve the best care. Trainers cannot feasibly provide that for their lesson horses.
Plus there are so many more vet care options than there were several decades ago. Things that couldn’t really be treated well long ago are recoverable with an investment in a big vet bill.
I think horses were relatively a lot less expensive decades ago, because they didn’t have the same lengthy lifespan, and they didn’t recover from a lot of things they would recover from with today’s treatment. There was a lot less certainty about how long a horse would last.
Today, how does a lesson program turn down care for something that is treatable but expensive? It may be cheaper than shopping for a new lesson horse, though.
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I think it depends on how useful the horse is. If the horse is beginner safe? Then taking a risk and spending money to return to some sort of soundness is probably worth some time and $$. It also generates good feelings with your clients. But a hotter horse that is only good for the gutsy advanced kids probably going to give you enough return on investment and probably needs to come back to a higher level of soundness to be useful
It makes sense, but in the long term it’s unsustainable. Someone, somewhere has to be the entry point to equestrian activities.
When I was a child, my NYC born and raised parents saw horse sports as the purview of the landed gentry and the idle rich. By the time I started riding there were riding academies of varying degrees of quality in suburbs across the US. Many of those barns had been established by either retired cavalry officers from WWII or their protégés. They were making riding something within the grasp of middle America by offering lessons and while purchasing was beyond many families’ means some offered leases etc.
If the lesson barn as I (and many of us) knew it disappears, we will return to a time where riding is something that you do if your parents ride or if you grow up on a farm or if your Mom or Dad is a trainer. That lesson barn was, for me an entry point to a lifelong involvement. My 2 closest friends 50 plus years later were girls I rode with in the early 70’s, even though they don’t ride anymore. Losing access to lesson barns would hurt equestrian sports and return access to quality instruction back to those who were born to the lifestyle.
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I agree, but I kind of think that’s where things are going (at least in my area). And while it might seem unfathomable to all of us, unfortunately the sports kids choose to pursue (to some degree) are always very dependent on ease of access as well as community support. There’s a reason why certain areas tend to produce, say, a ton of hockey players, long-distance runners, or basketball players.
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^^^ This really is the history of riding lessons, post WWII.
I think your prognosis for the future is very, very true.
A point about the retired cavalry officers (also my first lesson barn) is that they were on pension and not depending on the lesson barn for income. They probably wanted only that the lesson program would pay for itself – most of the time.
There have been some times and places where a lesson program, associated with other commerical equine activities, could be a fair living. But as we’ve seen over & over on COTH in the last few years, that’s now become very rare.
I think that lesson programs offered in communities now depend on people who don’t look on it as a living, but do expect it to pay for itself. A trainer barn with a heart for bringing horse-less families into the fold. A retired farm-owner-rider who is living near the burbs, which have probably grown increasingly close to the farm. That sort of thing.
And space matters a great deal. There aren’t many pro trainers who even have room in their facility or turn-out to keep lesson horses. And extra arenas for instructors to conduct lessons while the training rides & boarder-lessons go on elsewhere.
There just aren’t many people in such a situation to offer lesson programs that provide the horses themselves.
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This distinction, yes.
A while back I tried to find some lessons on lesson horses to stay in shape and work on things more advanced than my pony was doing at the time. I got ghosted by one trainer after driving an hour to her facility, and another offers lessons but wants $60 for a 30 min lesson which includes warm up and cool down, so like 20 minutes. I think that’s reflective of the cost of keeping good lesson horses but out of my budget.
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This is not uncommon these days. It is about time management - for the program, and also for the students who have little time.
An hour is on the schedule. That includes bringing the horse from the paddock, grooming, tacking & untacking, and turning the horse out again … AND the lesson. All in one hour. So the theory is that 15 minutes at the front of the hour, 15 minutes at the end of the hour is enough for all of the non-riding. And 30 min in the saddle, total.
That’s the lesson the few lesson students I know are getting. If they are slow with grooming, that comes out of their ride time.
If you bring your own horse, then the 30 minute lesson is still standard. And weirdly to me, riders are not expected to warm up and cool down outside of the lesson.
As a kid long ago, we had 2 hours ‘assumed’ as much as scheduled. 30 minutes on either end for thorough grooming & tacking, and that was with the horses already in the barn. 1 hour lesson time. In hindsight, 45 minutes would have been enough for the lesson - although we did some minutes of warm up and cool down on our own during that hour. And we didn’t always do one of the horse preparations if we were taking a horse from a previous lesson, or giving one to the next lesson on that horse, so the time was fluid on that.
But these days 1.5 to 2 hours is not time the parents are ready to give.
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That was what struck me, honestly; I asked if I was to warm up while she was finishing a lesson (she has online scheduling so you can pick your own times, they are broken into only 30 min chunks so it’s pretty obvious that the trainer isn’t catching/grooming, you are, and she is teaching while this happened). So I asked, would I be warming up before the start of the lesson, and she was very specific, “no.” I just don’t find 20 minutes valuable for a lesson, period. YMMV.
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