My issues with it? I am not the one aghasted that people choose to eat goat for their celebration.
I’ve made no assumptions. You’ve painted your own picture quite well.
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Same, only more joyous because we went up 20 degrees and the hoses unfroze, a Christmas miracle 
. Since all the replies are about the “help” I’m guessing that poster is trying to call out people for being hypocritical that the help was out on Christmas even tho we are advocating that a mere boarder not tamper with their meal. A reach.
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Isn’t this the truth!
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Off on a tangent…
That is something that has been truly shocking for me coming back into lessons, then boarding, as an adult. The level of ignorance of horses and horsekeeping, even among some people who have been horses owners and riders for a number of years, is astounding.
One hot summer day when I was at a barn in Florida, a boarder arrived and proceeded to question me, convinced that someone had been riding her horse because it was sweating. I told her it was miserably hot and the horses were mostly all sweating in the stalls even with the fans on. She was shocked to learn that horses would sweat in the heat without being ridden. She said, “I didn’t know they did that.”
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It is sad. I find it particularly frustrating because often they don’t understand the animals that they want to save. It isn’t bad to want good things for animals. But often they come from an anthropomorphic angle such as - “I would not want to be crated, thus the dog should not want to be crated” and then they miss out on the fact that not only is the dog likely perfectly fine, the dog is in dog heaven because dogs like dens, and that is said dog’s happy place.
I know they want to feel loving, but in reality they are doing the opposite. What I can’t understand is their resistance to being educated. True animal lovers want to understand. I can only understand what they do as love theater…all of the drama, none of the truth behind it.
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I know a lady who thought horses were 10 lbs when they were born.
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I suspect that in part, it’s related to the shift in barns that has happened over the years to being more and more full care and less and less horsemanship. Then there’s the “people who don’t take lessons but still buying horses” thing which has been happening as the good lesson barns disappear. I was shocked to meet horse owners who had never wrapped an injury (and didn’t know how to), but owned multiple horses for 5 years. People who had never ridden but bought two basically feral horses. Maybe that has always happened, but it’s still surprising to me every time I see it!
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I fed all weekend so I got shafted.
One is getting an abscess so I got to wrap her, everyone got extra hay and couldn’t find a hat or a scarf so I tried to keep my face from freezing off. 
It was a good weekend other than the cold. No one colicked or had any other serious issues.
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I shocks me all the time. It’s like they have never spent more than a couple hours at a barn at a time but have an opinion on everything. It’s like they read it on fb so it must be true. But their depth of knowledge is so shallow that even if they know some “facts” they don’t understand context. Most don’t really know that much about their own horses, and the horses suffer for it.
I don’t even know how you fix this because I think the reason horsey kids are able to learn it is because the have the time to just watch, and in a way, to experiment without pressure. Kids are also better at excepting being told off by adults. So if someone says “stop riding your horse it’s lame”, kids don’t typically throw tantrums about how much money they have spent to keep the horse sound.
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Sometimes the lack of animal awareness can be amusing. We recently acquired some new hens and 3 banties. Client thought the banties, in all their fancy plumage, were baby chicks.
Last summer BO sent a photo of acorns to clients, just to show how crazy the weather was. Acorns in July is a pretty blatant example of climate change. Most clients had to ask what was in the pics.
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Absolutely related to spending your youth in a program of full board and maybe training too. I met a perfectly nice adult returning rider who had a good seat but didn’t know what a palomino was called because she grew up in a h/j barn. All bay chestnut or grey! Most English riders also don’t know the various pinto patterns. Especially since pony club used to just say piebald and skewbald!
On the other hand when I came back to lessons I had never heard the term 20 metre circle 
though I’d ridden circles enough as a teen.
Anyhow I will guess that coming up through program barns is going to be especially common in a certain niche of the upper middle class that’s also suburban and non-farm and pressed for time and grows up to have money to throw at Goods and Services.
I was a print oriented child that liked information and I learned and remembered everything I could find on horse breeds, colors, tack, training, other riding styles, first aid, etc. But I also did self board starting at 14 with no intelligent adult help.
As an adult I also find other long time self board owners who have basic care down but don’t spend time reading up on problems they don’t have yet whereas here I am on COTH learning about founder, tendons, feeding rescue horses, nutrition, etc
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Me, too, and I think that’s part of why I’m always surprised that people don’t know things. As a horse crazy kid, I read every single horse book in every single library to which I had access. I also remember talking my Mom into some horse-book-of-the-month club when I was an early teen and every month received a new, mostly non-fiction/reference book. I was in heaven.
A few years ago I had to take the currently in vogue skills assessment at work. One of my top skills was something about being a collector of information. LOL. Yes, that’s me.
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Me too. I remember once when I was taking lessons at a boarding barn, one of the owners of the boarded horses said to me “if I had to feed my own horse, I wouldn’t even know where to start.”
Um…call me crazy but…maybe…hay?
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I’ve had numerous people while I’m in prepping evening feeds saying “how do you know what each horse needs” like it’s some sort of alchemy LOL Of course, I’m a little unique because I can keep it all in my head, but still, once a diet is created and balanced it’s not rocket science.
Same thing with exercise schedules (“wait…you mean I have to work my horse more than once a month?”) and other care.
I get the people won’t necessarily understand the nuances of training, but some of the basics just really shock me!
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You would be horrified at how many people have NO idea how the meat they consume gets in those packages they buy at the store…
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And when they happen to learn, THEY are horrified. The abyss between consumers and producers has never been so vast. The result is all around us.
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I remember explaining to a roommate 25+ years ago where chicken wings came from. She had never seen a whole chicken being prepped for cooking, and thought that the “drummette” part of a chicken wing was a tiny chicken leg.
I always wonder what her parents cooked for dinner?
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Here in my area, a small (50,000) city in a mostly rural area, still has a majority of elementary and middle school children that don’t know that vegetables grown from/on plants.
I have an acquaintance that runs a non-profit, model-farm type operation that specializes in school field trips, and she tells me that kids are BLOWN AWAY to learn that tomatoes grow on vines, carrots grow underground, etc.
And this is way before they learn the whole “guess where eggs come from?” bombshell!
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My mother was puzzled when she first saw chickens alive that they didn’t have 4 legs. She was a city girl, in her early 20s when she made the discovery.
More than a third of American children don’t understand that they are even animals https://sapienjournal.org/a-third-of-children-in-the-us-dont-know-how-meat-gets-to-the-table/
Always that awkward conversation explaining why cows must have babies. And it is not just men who don’t understand
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