I’m lost, how does 2-3 piles [of manure?] + some hay = 5 frozen muck tubs ?
She should be dumping the manure herself. If she cleans, she does it all the way…this would be the only thing that truly affects you.
Otherwise, if it isn’t going to affect your job, and the BO doesn’t care that she is wasting hay/shavings, then it’s kind of a lost battle. BO has already said ‘it’s not your problem’ . You can know/understand all day long that it’s a safety hazard, but until the true repercussions fall on the BO, I don’t see anything changing.
There were tons of things that were ‘wrong’ with a barn I rode at when I was younger(12, actually). We trailered in, so my horse didn’t have consistent contact with the trainer, nor employees and we had a separate vet/farrier The BO/Head Trainer would drug almost all the horses, even ones that weren’t hers. Farrier doing chop jobs on ponies and we would find puddles of blood on the ground after he had trimmed them. It was atrocious. But no know could tell her how to run her barn…The farrier was a friend of hers and she just couldn’t not give him the job of trimming and shoeing the entire barn. Umm…no…hell to the no. At 12, I knew this was a no.
BO hasn’t said anything as of yet, she’s away for a month. BM is the one who said not to care and if she gets hurt they are watching on the cameras and her mom knows where she is. Which to me as an adult is red flag. I can’t imagine the BO saying that when it’s a liability to her farm
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If the child is doing things that directly interfere with your work, as her to do things differently. She should dump the poop she mucks.
Otherwise, you’ve just been told by your boss that this question is above your pay grade.
Liability depends on who is carrying the insurance.
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Yikes!! That’s terrible.
For the OP’s question: I’m the parent of two horse savvy kids who often accompany me working in barns. The almost 12yo I will sometimes drop off for her lesson (obviously, the instructor and several others are present) I would not permit them to stay alone at a barn, especially until 10pm. I’ve worked at a barn where I only felt comfortable allowing them to handle one of the horses as the others were high-octane and unpredictable.
It’s not normal parenting IMO to leave a 13yo alone at a barn from 3-10. Apart from the obvious possibility of a horse-related accident, you have a young teen alone in an isolated place. Every couple years a woman is attacked or sexually assaulted at a barn around here. Heck. I’m a grown up, carry a knife, and have fought a few amateur MMA matches. Even I have felt uncomfortable enough alone in the dark doing barn chores that I left and came back in the morning to finish. Someone needs to help this kid out and figure out what is going on with this family.
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That’s bad if anyone is on a property alone and handling a horse they don’t trust.
Again, I’m a kid-sized 50 year old with decades of experience. If I were in this spot, darn-tootin’ I’d want someone else to be there or at least know where I was and be paying attention to my whereabouts.
I think the kid, who is spending 7 hours a day at the barn, who owns two and is trying to hand walk one who needs it, is trying to do the best she can with what she’s got. Why not help her to the smarter/safer solution rather than sit back and judge?
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Meh… it sounds like
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You don’t like the kid because she is making your job harder.
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You are citing the Kid and Safety issues as a rather unimpeachable basis for getting the kid to cut out the late-night mucking.
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With the info OP added it still sounds like weird parenting & probable bad choice on BM’s part, especially if BO has not been informed.
If BO is in on it, they must have some terrific liability coverage.
“If she gets hurt…” is a pretty cavalier approach by BM.
@BeeHoney & @PNWjumper raise valid concerns as well.
OP, sounds like you are between Rock & Hard Place.
IIWM, I would let BO know your concerns, including the added work.
How this is met will tell you what you need to know to decide if you are comfortable continuing to work at this barn.
5 buckets come from one from each stall that she picks. But some concern comes from the picking yes, we just had a girl get double barreled and has now been out for 3 months with broken ribs and other things.
The horses the child is riding aren’t made little hunter ponies who know their job. She thinks she’s " training" them while simply the owner wants the exercised. One horse she jumped with out permission when she was supposed to just be walking it around. Horse number two is an 18 hand warmblood that is strong for its owner who’s a man, she rode it for an hour and a half and said come on buck higher! And would crack with the whip, horse number 3 is a known dangerous horse. Has broken peoples arms and put many people in the hospital.
If the BO decides she can ride her own horses alone fine, but I feel like anything else she needs supervision. Or supervision all times because she’s a kid who doesn’t know when to stop. Her trainer tells her to ride for an hour and she takes it to heart. Same trainer told her to ride the horse more to see where it’s lame instead of calling the vet out…
Well, there are many safety fails in this picture. But with this additional information, I’m going to say that you are not at a barn where the adults in charge have a strong sense of safety either.
In that case, you have a choice. Keep your head down and let the circus unfold around you. Or quit and get another job if you can’t stand how things are done here.
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@Scribbler for the Win!
OP: since you’ve been present to witness these “training rides” that kinda puts you in the Supervising Adult chair… Unless you are also under 18yo.
Do you want that job too?
OP, you’ve been told the barn’s cameras will catch anything that goes wrong. That sucks, but it is what it is, and relieves you of worrying about reporting what this kid is doing/not doing. Sounds like you are the only person who cares about her, and since you were once in her boots you know what it’s like to be a 13yo working at a barn.
It’s hard to shuck off the mental worry, but maybe you can shuck off the responsibility, especially since the person in charge of the horses and of you and the girl has told you to let it go. This kid sounds way out of line and full of herself, not just young and conscientious, but bull-headed and lacking in good judgment. But she’s a minor child, and not yours, and really all you can do is call 911 when/if she gets hurt and try not to stress yourself out over the situation.
She should be at home at 10 o’clock at night, doing her homework and then sleeping. Sounds like she needs a social worker, but you are not that person.
I don’t know what to suggest about the muck buckets other than lock them up when you leave, but then she might just decide to carry the manure fork by fork out to the manure pile.
Assuming the muck tubs get carried to a pile.
many barns I worked in used muck tubs at night to pick or in groom stalls… dumped in the spreader the next morning when stalls get done. Op could tell the kid to dump them on the pile if that’s how they get emptied. Seems easy to do.
Not sure how a kid picking stalls, even if leaving it in tubs overnight is a problem. shrug
OP, your last post sure did ramp up the danger the kid is in, the troubling details. Why not explain that the one horse has broken people, or that she overworks the other horse in the first post about this kid? Posting in this way, ramping up and expanding the troubling details in subsequent posts makes it seem disingenuous.
This is one of those I really would not want a young teenager at a barn by themselves for several reason, and all the reasons are primary.
Injury? one poster said their is this 2 hr deal if not hearing from the kid in 2 hours then assume something is wrong. Our youngest daughter after school one pretty spring day was working one of our horses over some jumps, she had a course set up that required rounding the barn. On one pass she goes behind the barn and does not come out on the back side… other daughter who is in the house notices that her sister was not insight. Older daughter goes out to find that sister’s horse has slid down falling on the grass because the horse had flat steel plate shoes on… horse gets up, daughter’s foot is hung in the stirrup, daughter is on ground foot is in stirrup, horse is broke to ground tie so is just standing there. Older daughter being the good horse person she is had a lock blade knife which she used to cut the stirrup leather to free her sister’s foot. Nearly every bone was broken in her right foot. Wait two hours? If she would not have been dead she would at least have had her right foot amputated.
Also I will not allow any child to be here without their parent to supervise as I want the protection personally … I do not want to be open to any wrongful claim of any thing improper ever occurring
Haven’t read all the details, but: Somewhere earlier it was mentioned and I will repeat: What parent(s) leave a 13 yr old at a barn from 3 until 10 pm? If this is regular and accurate, I’m beyond dumbfounded. If I were the BO or BM, I’d be fretting about my liability exposure. And laying down some new rules.
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When I ran a boarding barn, I had a rule that any child under 16 had to be accompanied by an adult. And no dropping off (except for occasional exceptions, with permission granted in advance) and leaving; the adult was to be supervising the child at least minimally. A child dropped for a lesson with an instructor, who then was the responsible adult, was acceptable, but no loitering about for hours after.
Working with horses/in stalls after hours unsupervised would have been a big no-no in my barn.
My reasoning: If a parent deemed their driving-age child mature and responsible enough to drive her/himself to the barn and have a ride without adult supervision, I was fine with accepting their judgement unless/until evidence to the contrary arose. I was lucky enough to have great kids and parents, for the most part, as clients. The kids followed rules, were tidy, good horsewomen, and kind to each other.
Last barn I boarded at any kid under 16 had to be supervised. As approve if a parent feels their kid can drive alone then they can ride. The two girls that lived within walking distance did become a problem
and BM had to put her foot down. Since I was often their riding after they got home the kids tried to say I was the adult and they could ride. Both girls parents said this was fine. I said no, I made it very plain to the BM that I was not taking care of the girls and they couldn’t ride with me. After really talking to all the barn BM said if she was their kids could be, she was ok with that, but if it was anyone else they couldn’t unless it was a lesson or their parents where there. There was a lot of fighting about this but the BM held her ground.
As far as the 3-10 this that just seems extreme to me. When I was that age I never spent that long at the barn, I had homework to do. To me it seems the parents don’t really care.
I would seriously consider contacting the BO to at least make sure that they are aware of what’s going it. I’d also make sure any contract you’ve sign doesn’t mention anything about you taking care of others on the property.
Actually my thoughts are all over the place on this as our kids at a young age were mature with a mental age that was decades beyond their chronological age. So I have a double standard.
If I had a public barn, no I would not allow an unsupervised child to be there for their safety and for the barn owner’s safety
It is sad that this kids parents leave her there unsupervised, but if they and the BM are OK with it, then I’d just stay out of it.
We have 5 ponies (2 small, 1 medium and 2 large!) that are all older, well-handled, quiet and pretty bomb-proof.
My 12 yr old granddaughter is allowed to catch her pony, groom and tack up all alone …but someone has to be very nearby… ie in the barn/hay loft.
She is allowed to go into the paddocks to take photos and groom. She wears her helmet.
She is not allowed to ride her pony unless someone is there.
She can only ‘hack’ alone around the 10+ acre field beside the ring.
She always has her phone with her.
Oh…and she is an excellent stall cleaner… and is quite capable of pushing and dumping the wheelbarrow!
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As staff, you don’t really have much say, or risk, but I can understand the annoyance.
As a BO, my insurance says that anyone under 18 has to be under direct supervision of an adult when working with horses (not just an adult on the premises). I imagine this is true of all insurance companies.
I used to be the kid that was at the barn from after school until 9:30 or so, but it was a busy barn, and there was staff working until 10pm.
As for her stall picking being wasteful and making for more work, it sounds like she is trying, but perhaps needs some guidance. As for her riding: it sounds sadly familiar, but you don’t sound like you are in a position to change this, and if this is in line with the training practices of the barn, it just might not be the right place for you.
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