Are there really barns out there doing credit checks on their boarders? That’s wild to me. Maybe it’s because I’ve only ever boarded at facilities where I was coming in as a friend/existing client to barn owner or trainer, not a stranger.
I’d still really hesitate to hand my SSN over to a barn owner, especially as part of a preliminary boarding contract/vetting type of interaction.
The only deadbeat boarder I’ve had was in the news for selling his business for $25 million a few years before his horses came here, and for his 15 acre Southampton hunter jumper barn. Credit reports (no I don’t get them on boarders) only get you so far. Some of the best boarders I’ve had had very little money, but would eat Ramen so their horse was well cared for.
The last place I boarded was like that. I put up a slow feed net to keep my mare occupied between feedings. Many boarders did.
Re credit checks — while I have never heard of them being done locally, when I think about it maybe they should be standard for board barns. The board frequently costs as much as apartment rent. Every new boarder is a risk for the barn owner.
Wow, I’ve never heard of that. They don’t do night check and feed hay then? Would be a definite deal breaker for me.
True, but at least the barn has the owner’s horse and tack as collateral if they don’t pay.
No! Also the horses get blanketed at 3-4pm when it’s the biggest heat…
Ugh. This is what I am living too. No night check which means no extra hay then either. You make what you have to work but there are people on property 24/7 so that isn’t a reason in this case I am just concerned and confused why it hasn’t become the norm now to have hay in front of them all the time vs what people thought was acceptable 30 years ago.
That’s insane. No night check / night hay would be an absolute deal breaker for me. I’ve never heard of that.
I hadn’t heard of it either for a barn where the owners are the animal care takers as well. It has really been eating at me but it is what it is for now and I have taken the extra hay situation into my own hands. The more I read posts on this forum that the hay issue is pretty common the less I feel like an idiot for not asking more questions at my pre move in walk through but it had never been a question at the other facilities I have been.
I envy those who live where you can consider these deal breakers and still find a good barn nearby. Here it is take an available boarding space and tolerate deficiencies or the space will be jumped on by someone else. If you’re picky the best option may require an 80 mile drive to ride - and I did that drive for twenty years. But I did it even more for my horses.
No real night check where I board (or at any options I have found) There used to be enough boarders riding at night (me too) that there would be eyes in the barn to notice problems until 8 or 9 pm most nights. No late night hay generally. Now I am retired and ride during the day and there are only a couple of people that come out irregularly. To top it off, BO has decided to do night turnout all year round. So my horse is in his paddock with a nice shed and a full haynet by 5 or 6 and may not be seen until 8 am. Not ideal, espeially since there isnt a heated waterer. But no luck finding any better alternatives.
Yep. Following this thread I have shaken my head a few times wondering how we find boarding at all, let alone find ourselves allowed to stay.
I’ve more or less been a self-care boarder my entire horse life, thank goodness. Handful of times I’ve been on full care I have not been impressed. 99% of the barns I’ve been at I wouldn’t trust them with a Breyer horse let alone a real one. That includes some higher-end choices.
I have to wonder, do people truly not take the time to update their knowledge base? Are people really that…what’s the word I want…? I can’t fathom a life where I’m not learning something, or open to learning. There is almost always a better way to do something. Not a more complicated or even expensive way, just ‘better’ in some way.
Animals didn’t ask to be domesticated. We humans did that to them. The least we can do is make their lives as comfortable as we can.
The horses at our barn never run out of hay. We have slow feed hay nets (that we purchased as BOs) that are filled and checked 4x/day.
However, I will say that the amount of hay and specialized feeds that we provide does not make any money for us. We don’t do this for a living so it is fine, but feed/hay/and bedding costs have gone through the roof.
So many barns in our area, to keep costs down, do the minimum (~2-3 flakes, 2x/day). People are willing to pay more for that + an indoor than to not have one but have free choice forage. That’s not what we have chosen, but I can totally see why the rest do what they do.
Here’s a literal one that I just moved my horse to a new barn over in the matter of a couple days:
Chickens being kept in the barn with the horses with heat lamps. Over water. Next to hay, farm equipment, sawdust, and fuel cans in a cobwebbed filled barn.
It’s a real catch-22 for BOs. Boarders don’t want any corners cut when it comes to feed and care, yet generally won’t pay a monthly board amount that would allow a barn to break even, let alone make a small profit.
Totally agree, I also don’t need to support myself through boarding. I’ve never said it but I’ve long thought boarders should look for a set up where the BO doesn’t need to make money. You can know that I/they won’t skimp on hay if money’s tight.
Otoh, if the bo doesn’t actually do the work themselves that’s not great either, often they are wealthy people who have no clue about good horse care, and they get taken advantage of by professional horsepeople.
It is. I think eventually the market will adjust. It has to. In the short term however, it’s painful.
Where I board one of my horses, the BOers do all the work. Mrs. BO supports the family and the barn with her salary and the husband does the lion’s share of barn work and minds the kids. He doesn’t work outside the home (in a manner of speaking) at all. While the horses don’t have 24/7 hay, they are fed 4x a day with the last hay at 9 PM.
I have been at a barn where I paid extra for a slow feed hay net to be fed in addition to his regular dinner hay of 2 flakes and several times I’d find they considered the hay net to be his dinner hay and wouldn’t feed him at dinner time, except for the net. This barn had a regular turnover of barn help which were mostly tweens or teen girls who didn’t know how to read a feed chart posted outside my stall. I had it plainly spelled out how much and how often and they still screwed it up. I left.
We do the bulk of the work here despite both having full time jobs (and really just the bulk of the work because burnout is real).
It’s really a no-win situation.
People who do this “for a living” often can’t afford to. People who don’t do this for a living can afford to, but then they either are taken advantage of or hire staff who don’t “get it”.
We carry on, doing our best, trying to keep our staff trained and omg the extent of the feed charts and explicit instructions that I give…but even so, on occasion there are mistakes. It’s frustrating.
Anyway - I originally wanted to address the comment that “barn owners aren’t keeping up with the latest science”. That’s normally not the problem (although I’m sure there are a few that are grizzled and fed up). The problem is that the equine economy is whack.
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