Every year at Fair the aisles are full of Maroons with kids in strollers, loose toddlers & babies bring carried.
About 1 in every 30 parents asks if stabled horses/ponies/minis can be petted.
The rest let kids stick their hands & faces into any open part of a stall.
Signs are posted at the entrances advising horses can bite.
Yet I’ve seen babies held up to horses’ heads without a thought to either that mouthful of teeth or sledgehammer skull.
I don’t harness in the aisle because that guarantees a kid running up to put hands on my (TG) tolerant mini, while oblivious idjit parents smile indulgently.
Maybe they don’t like their kids? 
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Some kids – maybe more than ‘some’ – need strong survival instincts to make it to adulthood in one piece.
Fortunately the kids of such parents seem to be pretty good at that.
They may do seriously dumb stuff, but they’re resilient, and heal well enough with minimal (if any) medical assistance.
I think I may have been one of those kids. My mom was worried, but dad – nah. He had grown up as one of those kids, too.
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Plus have seen parents who seem to think that kids are expendable. More where those came from.
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Y’know, I nominally agree with that assessment. “The burned finger is the best teacher.”
Our youngest really, really wanted to ride my dirt bike (a little 200cc Honda). He wasn’t interested in lessons, he was convinced he could do it.
He made it halfway down the (dirt) driveway before reality caught up with him. I extracted him from the tangle, and asked if he wanted to try again. He did. And he did. And he did, eventually getting to the point where he could pilot the thing around in first gear. Not too many bruises, and only a little blood. Could have been worse :-D.
Then he was interested in some pointers . . .
“Let them be kids.”
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Sounds like the stables at the Royal in Toronto. Aisles packed with everything from Hackney Ponies to 8 horse hitch heavy horses being hitched and people with the whole fan damily in tow, often with a stroller or two working their way through. I almost had a nervous breakdown watching and I didn’t own any of the horses being hitched.
Almost the same thing at our local fair, people pushing strollers through a bunch of games horses to get into the arena. Fortunately someone had the good sense to close the area off to spectators.
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That’s great, as long as the parents have a clue as to the risk involved.
But holding an infant THIS CLOSE to a horse’s face… A horse they don’t know… Parents who don’t know horses at all… 
Just Stoopid 
@jvanrens The Draft (up to 8-hitches ) barn ropes off the aisles.
Horse & Pony barns don’t get that extra measure 
Fam Damilies (
thanks for that!) walk under the ropes, strollers first, right alongside those humongous Draft feet, shod in the Scotched show shoes 
One STOMP & your kid is pulp 
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Well yeah, there is that.
I am also of the opinion that some people should not be allowed to bear progeny. That “clueless” thing for one, altho that isn’t at the top of my piss-poor-parenting concerns. Ignorance is curable, “Stoopid”, in general is not.
I haven’t had much luck sharing that concept, tho. “Breed We Must :-P.”
Don’t even get me started . . .
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This level of stoopid has been going on forever. When I was a teen (50 years ago), I had a mare who would bite. I’m talking come over the dutch door-teeth bared-take off your hand bite (I have the scar on my back as proof). So at the county fair I had a BIG sign on the door that said “horse bites”. And I was sitting on a bale across the aisle when a parent walks up and holds up their toddler to “pet the nice horsie”. Fortunately the “nice horsie” was busy eating hay instead of toddlers that day…
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I had a local trainer hopper show up in my parking lot demanding a stall. I explained that I was full (forever in her case) and mentioned a couple of other places she could look. She said “but you have all of those empty stalls!” I said “see those horses in the paddocks? If you count them and count the empty stalls, you’ll see there’s an equal number…” She said “well, I’ll just take one of those back stalls then.” I explained that those were my landlord’s run in stalls for his horses, and she could go to the house and talk to him about boarding with him (cringe). She actually thought she could stick her horse in one of those (never, ever cleaned) stalls and be one of my boarders. It took another 10 mins of heated discussion and my actually getting in my car and pretending to drive away before she’d shut up and leave. About a year later she’d moved a few states away and bought her own farm.
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The above is one of those times I’d take the advice of a previous poster: “‘No’, is a one word answer”!
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That’s my sawdust bin shovel. Perfect for that, not so much anything else. My husband found mine in the metal recycling bin at the dump, with a damaged edge, which he ground off to make it useable again.
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That’s an amazing husband! 
OMG, people. I can’t take it. The tone of so many of these posts is, “How can everyone [except me, in my horse wisdom] not only be a total idiot but not know they’re a total idiot? Everyone [else] is so stupid. I’m the only adult in the room and everyone else makes my life so hard.”
Most people don’t get to county fairs, or know anyone who grew up on farm, anymore. People do these things because no one has ever taken the extra 30 seconds to offer education in way that people actually welcome what’s being said, vs. feeling suddenly defensive.
If we know so much, and think we are the only adults in the room, and that our experience is the only experience that matters, maybe we can act like adults and be friendly and teach the tourists why they shouldn’t feed horses over the fence, or why they can’t ride our horses. It might take 30 seconds to explain. Or, put up a sign.
Granted, if it takes more than 30 seconds, I’m with you and go ahead and BB-gun the morons or jettison them into space, or at least point them back on the road in the direction of the city.
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Not that you were not warned by the title what this thread was about? 
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Oh, I’m the envy of all my horse friends. Our stable burnt to the ground and he rebuilt it. Built me a dressage arena … he’s a keeper.
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I know, Bluey, but sometimes the pile-on negativity just pushes me over my limit, and I rant crankily too. 
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As Grandma used to say, all of us have our moments, don’t we. 
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