Wow! That is ballsy of her. When did you become a daycare?
7 Likes
Had someone call about boarding their horses.
I said we are a private barn and gave her two public barn names to check.
She ignored my answer and asked “you do have a barn with stalls?”
Yes, a private barn.
“Well, I want to board my horses there.”
We are a PRIVATE barn.
“But I am new here and want to board my horses at your barn, they told me is very nice.”
I repeated myself, said check with such and such for public boarding, they will help you.
Can you imagine having such an entitled boarder around?
17 Likes
@Sleipnir now I’m really curious as to exactly what wording and tone you used to reply to her. 
Maybe you could have just left her kids at the barn all day, with the saintly 18 yo gelding in charge? The horse will watch them! Of course he doesn’t use a cell phone, so no way to call 911. Or their mom to come get them, right now. 
3 Likes
Aww, you must be heartbroken. /s
7 Likes
I was very polite and just repeatedly explained that I would not watch her kids and, as we’re an active jumping/stud farm, it’s really not a place for unattended children. I was still open to organising a nice afternoon and a picnic afterwards, just not like she envisioned!
I don’t know how I really cope without her attention now.
12 Likes
They think it’s funny that she’s choking and can’t eat the carrot chunks?! These people are sociopaths.
2 Likes
Well, in all honesty they probably were too stupid to realize she was almost choking. They probably thought she was playing with her food with all the tongue lolling, mouth smacking and pieces falling out. I knew she had choked before and was on a carefully managed diet due to no more teeth. Again, I wouldn’t have been so angry if it wasn’t for the fact that there was a large sign on her stall gate as to why she couldn’t eat treats, and they fed her anyway!
8 Likes
Since I own a horse who is allergic to carrots and will break out in hives that become open weeping sores, I would probably be less than kind if I caught them feeding my horse treats.
10 Likes
Same here happened with a buyer. I had a fail proof children’s beginner horse to pass on. A set of totally inexperienced parents showed up with a timid child. No one knew any moves around a horse. Next words out of their mouth was they had just bought a 5 acre property with an old barn, bragging about it, and oh boy they could take in a boarder or two for some company. I just envisioned a know it all type of boarder also.
I had to say and repeat it NO. I recommended an excellent lesson barn close to them and said start there.
7 Likes
I’ve shared this before but yikes Those People are out there. A friend had a nice steady eddy for sale and listed him as “a horse the whole family can ride.” A whole family did show up, with picnic basket, to spend the day riding the horse. Grandpa knew EVERYTHING about horses so it might have been worth it to hang out with him. Sigh.
1 Like
My reaction to many of these stories is EEEEK!, or Oy Vey! 
I’ll add a couple of my own experiences, though they are fairly benign.
When my homebred mare was about 5 (so still green), one of my dog students texted me out of the blue asking whether she could “borrow” my mare for a kid’s birthday party. The kids wanted to “paint” and “play with” a horse, along with doing pony rides - presumably for every kid at the party.
Okay, um, well (as someone noted above) she was “not the right horse” for this - but the fact that she would “assume” this was, Hmmm. Mystifying? (I’ll not go “sense of entitlement”, though our area of Northern VA - about 20 miles from D.C. - is famous for attracting people like this.)
She was perfectly nice otherwise, but had trouble understanding why this would be an unreasonable request. I responded with “there are services that you can hire for pony rides, etc. at parties”, and asked my horse peep FB friends for suggestions and recommendations - they provided them - and I passed the info on to the dog student. Another hint that her judgment was not the best? She had a Goldendoodle - still intact - that she wanted to use as a “breeding dog” because “he has such a good temperament!” I tried to gently steer her away from this idea.
My second story involved my young TB (I bought him as a weanling); my brother-in-law and sister-in-law came out to the boarding barn to see the horses on a visit here, and when I led Felix out of the barn, my BIL reached up and put their baby son (less than one year old?) on my 2 year old TB’s back.
Luckily he had an exceptional temperament and was one of the calmest and most sensible babies I had ever worked with (phew), so was completely unphased. I told my BIL “that is not a good idea!!, this horse has not been ridden yet!” and he took the son off, but Holy Crap.
(My SIL was busy walking through the barn and recoiling at the friendly horse faces looking out from their stalls, saying: “OMG, they are going to EAT me!”)
Luckily I have taught my DH all kinds of wrangling skills over the years, and he had the good sense not to bring his sister and BIL out to the barn again after that…
6 Likes
If something like this comes up, I just ask them about their liability insurance. 
They are likely to need it.
And the services have their own liability insurance. 
It is mystifying to me as well that so. many. parents. don’t realize that horses are a dangerous, risk situation. How they look at that huge creature with a mind of its own and think that it’s about as dangerous as the couch in their living room is beyond me. But so many of them behave that way.
5 Likes
Because they do not know what they do not know.
It seems crazy to us. But so many people now days have no experience with livestock other than the occasional petting zoo, where everything is perfectly safe for anyone to touch.
8 Likes
As a teenager, my daughter worked a couple of summers at the local zoo, supervising the pony rides. (The people running it were really great – the ponies were extremely well cared for, worked in short shifts, a nice life for those ponies.) The workers would put the kids up on the ponies, hand a lead rope to the parents (or lead themselves if the parents were terrified) so they could amble around a track in a nice shady little spot. She had to yell 50 times a day, “Do not drop the pony!!!” She said she learned a LOT about human nature doing those rides . Her favourite was the parents who, the second the pony sneezed, or shook its head, would drop the lead rope and RUN – leaving their precious baby on the back of a terrifying beast.
15 Likes
No is a complete sentence.
“Oh no, I am sorry that is just not possible.”
“No, I don’t have the appropriate insurance that covers anyone besides myself”
“Yes, my horses require the rider to be insured, the policies start at insert some lie of high dollar value premium”
“No my horses require insert some lie of licensing / formal letters of recommendation from 3 BNTs in XYZ discipline documenting your riding experience and ability”
Most people will not put in any effort to identify these lies as if they had the ability to problem solve or be self aware - they’d not have asked in the first place.
If anyone pursues continuously then they have much bigger issues with boundaries and probbbbabllyy shouldn’t be in your life.
4 Likes
It’s the same people who think it’s perfectly fine to ignore all the posted signs and walk up to a bison in Yellowstone
19 Likes
I can’t remember if I’ve posted about this before: DH and I were driving somewhere with bison (probably Yellowstone), and we got stuck in traffic on a road with a lane going in each direction. Some asshats were chasing bison with a car from the other direction, with someone hanging out the sunroof yelling. We had nowhere to go, and the bison started eyeing our car. I think it figured it could knock us out of the way and make an escape. We were trying to figure out how we would explain to Hertz what happened to their car, but then after a few glares and snorts, it moved on. Of course we had no cell service to report these idiots.
Rebecca
4 Likes
This reminds me of something that happened more than 30 years ago. The graphic artist at work, who was basically a nice guy, kept dropping hints about riding my horses. He said " I won’t hurt them, I’ll let them do whatever they want."
He had a couple of young children. I said something like “How would you feel if I offered to take care of your children for the weekend. They couldn’t get hurt, because I would let them do whatever they wanted.”
He did not ask again.
11 Likes
All is now explained.
Now I get it. Thank you.
5 Likes
Hence all the Tourons trying to pet wild buffalo and elk at the national parks!
** Oops, just saw that others posted the same thing!
3 Likes
