Barn rule about minors and supervision?

[saultgirl]

I started being at the barn all day unsupervised in the summer from about age 13, when I got to lease a horse for the summer. I somehow managed to stretch out grooming, tacking, riding, untacking, bathing/cooling out, grooming, cleaning the stall/buckets/setting feed/throwing hay, cleaning my tack, re-organizing my tack box, hand-grazing, sweeping the barn, etc., that i still wasn’t done when my mom came to pick me up. There were lots of other girls my age doing the same, though, so we had each other there, and we never really got into any trouble (although I realize now we probably should have let an adult know when we were going on long trail rides off the property).

8 years old is too young, though, I think. My sister was probably 9/10 when I was there “watching” her as a 13/14 year old.

And we always packed a lunch.

[Albertabound]

I have often been the adult at the barn with a gang of feral children. I feel like I have seen it all. The young teens riding school horses aggressively with no warm up or cool down, over facing them to jumps and beating them when they couldn’t do it, then throwing them back in their stalls heaving and wet. Riding boarder’s horses they had no permission to ride. Using other people’s saddles they had no permission to use because they were more comfortable. Seeing how many people they could pile on one horse’s back. Seeing how many people could stand on one horse’s back. Seeing how many people lying down in a row a horse could jump over,…you name it, they did it.

Whenever I spoke to them about it they responded with shock and outrage, then continued their antics. I never saw any parents, so couldn’t speak to them. When I spoke to the barn owner she didn’t believe me and told me to mind my own business. Oddly enough though, she was always wondering why her school horses were so broken and why her daughter’s expensive saddle was getting beat up.

I left and moved to another barn where the fifteen year old girls who hung around all day were having sex with the much older barn staff.

I like my chicken free range. Children, not so much!:mad:

[Denali6298]

This thread makes me sad as a former barn rat. From 11 on I was always at the barn during the summer without my parents. My friend and I would do barn chores take our lessons and do any extras. As I got older I would help with the summer camp. It would never occur to us to be there and not be cleaning stalls, picking rocks out of the paddock or something.