10 inches of snow, downpours, broken water heaters and a feral one-year-old sound like a recipe for a stiff drink. Cheers! And unrelated, thanks to you and your husband for your service!
Our January weather has been INSANE here too. Severe weather (hurricane level wind and rains with fatal tornadoes in week one, arctic blast in weeks two and three-ish, now rain, rain rain). On top of that my older mare is a princess and hates a drop of rain on her and just wants to watch it from the barn. My young horse would prefer to be out in it all the time and is mainly an uncivilized (but lovable) jerk who while carting out my warm water during the arctic freeze thought it would be fun to turn over all the buckets before I could hang them.
Coastal NC is VERY scarce, but I’m in the greater Charlotte metro area and fortunate to be in super close proximity to my long-standing vets, farriers, feed stores and the likes. And still an easy drive (under an hour) to the international airport and within close proximity to several cities for cultural events and the like. But to your point, vets and farriers here are in shorter supply than truly horsey areas so I work HARD to make sure we’re good clients in every respect as I see regular posts of folks in emergency situations who are no longer on an active client list. And vets and farriers are now regularly firing clients. Scary!
You are obviously not getting this in your current situation so why are working so hard to stay there? They have made it pretty clear that they are not going to change the way they do things so why not try and find a better situation? You are not necessarily asking for anything unreasonable, I would want someone experienced handling my horses too, but thinking you are going to change things at this place might be a touch unrealistic.
This thread sure went South. In my opinion, it went South because certain people posted assumptions that just did not apply to the situation as well as insults. I told them that their assumptions did not apply to this situation. Some people dragged up information they found about Sir SpooksAlot and tried to reason that he was a problem horse, ignoring the facts of the situation or even basically asking how he responds to blanketing. Basically, several people here sort of invented facts about the situation and didn’t want to hear that their assumptions weren’t correct. It gets very old.
Steady-handed responses were met with steady-handed replies. Assumptions that were incorrect were met with a reply saying that the assumption simply isn’t correct. It’s not a part of the reality of the situation. Unfortunately, as time went on, fewer and fewer people wanted to discuss rather than assume.
@J-Lu you have been INCREDIBLY rude and mean-spirited to several people in this thread. To be fair, several people have been very rude and mean-spirited to you in turn. Still, you have gotten incredibly aggressive with any poster who who goes “maybe some of /issue/ could be resolved by you”. Just being downright nasty. It costs you $0 to just stop responding to people you don’t like or you feel are just piling on you and just generally unhelpful. It is bonkers watching you continue to type out short (and long) replies to people that boil down to “I don’t care for your opinion. Stop talking to me.”. The same people to! For 3 weeks!
@RhythmNCruise had a lovely comment summarizing most of the questions people had about the situation (post #212). Your response was this:
Completely unwarranted hostility. You started out sarcastic then said she was making assumptions when Rhythm was ASKING YOU TO CLARIFY YOURSELF. Instead of just not responding, you took time out of your day to be nasty. Read that post yourself. Is this how you would talk to other adults in your life? Is this how you think a productive discussion should go? Another response was to just say “read the thread”, which is wildly unhelpful and everyone would have been better served if you just didn’t respond. You don’t have to respond to every comment, aimed at you or not.
You also keep changing the story and/or adding new information after being questioned, then insulting people for taking your word at face value. There is also nothing wrong with checking a poster’s history to see if that may have some more information that could help the discussion. That is not stalking; you made public posts on this forum and people looked at them. People pointing out that a horse with the nickname (given by you) of “Sir Spooks-a-Lot” is capable of spooking is not stalking.
@FitzE was correct in her post that YOU @J-Lu said YOUR HORSE damaged the fence and that’s what led to hotwire being installed. It is irrelevant how or why the damage occurred, just that your horse was the damage dealer. You then proceeded to argue that the statement YOU SAID was wrong and Rhythm was cherry-picking.
You are not capable of being “objective” about your horse because he belongs to you.
My mare is my baby and my first horse. I got her an almost-yearling (yes, not a great combo but I had a plan) and did a lot of her early groundwork myself. I found her wonderfully easy to work with (willing to try anything, even hesitantly, unbothered by most things, friendly, loves being around people). I made sure to spend lots of time working with her because I was terrified of spoiling her (as many people do with babies) and thus ruining the rest of her life. I ponied her, taught her to give to pressure, lunge with do-dads flapping about, desensitized her to common items, to blindfold, to be touched all over, and the beginnings of ground-tying. I was firm with her and made her do things she didn’t want to do all the time. She had to work and use her baby brain. Her ground manners were impeccable (outside of being caught).
When she went to the trainer’s, I got reports back that she was being difficult and reacting in ways she had never done with me. She would occasionally spook at something minor, then take off in BLIND PANIC, once falling in the process. These were all to things she’d been exposed to before and been fine with. Mare also developed a fun “No, I don’t want to, piss-off” button. This behavior persisted across two trainers. To this day I have never experienced ANY of this behavior. Many would assume it’s because “oh, @LilDunFilly probably didn’t push Mare like a trainer would. She probably let Mare get away with murder and spoilt her”. NOPE! Our trainer and I finally concluded that Mare was (is) smart as a whip, and didn’t believe “a job” was something she needed to have. Thankfully she grew out of that and is now back to being a good bean. Still, I never told trainers “No, my horse would never do any of that! She’s never done that before!” because horses do new things all the time. In my head, I like to think “She’d never do that with me!!!” and then remind myself Black Stallion syndrome is a thing. For example, I handfed Mare treats all the time as a baby/young horse. She never nipped me or got muggy. She tried investigating my pockets once and I put an end to that quick, out of fear she’d become annoying and bitey. No one else was giving her treats unless I was there. She was perfectly polite when accepting treats from others, adults and children, though I usually had children put it in her food bucket. Yet, one day, I watched a child feed Mare a treat and she immediately got muggy (at which point I immediately banned anyone hand-feeding her treats, including myself)! I’ve never seen her do it again and reports from our trainer says she’s anti-muggy. She knows when people are giving her cookies, but she just pricks her ears, nickers, and stands at attention until she gently takes it from whoever. Tl;dr: Horses are unpredictable, meaning they can and will do things you’d never expect!
You are absolutely allowed to completely disagree with every single poster on COTH. You are free to assume that you are completely right and anyone who says otherwise obviously lacks all the facts. If you take that route, I’d encourage you to ask yourself why you belive you know better than every other poster, and if so, why you bothered asking in the first place. But more than that, I ask you to consider why you continue to respond. You don’t like anyone’s posts; I wouldn’t imagine it’s particularly fun reading lots of people go “You’re wrong and I’d hate you as a boarder”. Again, it costs $0 to simply mute the thread and move on.
If the hill you want to die on is “my horse has never done anything wrong in his life” keep going. Your defense of his honor as the “least problematic horse at the barn” probably means little to him since he can’t read but it is the thought that counts. As someone earlier said, your responses to this thread are in-line with the responses of COTH Trainwreck Hall of Famers… Hell, this is how trainwrecks go on any website frankly (do love watching a good trainwreck). Put yeah, I would suggest you put down the shovel and stop digging yourself a deeper hole. You aren’t getting anything but stress from this thread. Everyone else is getting a show.
You were literally posting in another thread AFTER you started THIS thread and calling him “Sir Spooks-a-Lot” in that thread. There was no dragging anything up. It was literally clicking on another thread and discovering that while you were on this thread blaming a young woman’s lack of qualification for why your horse accidentally touched a hot wire and spooked, you were also posting on another thread calling said horse “Sir Spooks-a-Lot.”
We can only go on what YOU TELL US. And what you tell us leaves a lot of room for interpretation because you aren’t clear and refuse to answer questions that would clarify.
For instance…did the girl get your horse blanketed?
What do you expect people to do when you refuse to even answer something as relevant and simple as that? Talk about omitting facts. That’s a pretty big fact to omit in this situation, isn’t it?
No, my horse didn’t require the hotwire although you think he did because you DIDN’T read the posts or ask for clarification in a normal way. ALL paddocks have hot wire and his food bucket was moved to the hotwire then they painted the run-in and hot-wired that side of the run-in off. You have no idea what you’re posting about and support my argument here. YOU have no idea about how to be objective and know relatively little about the actual situation. But that won’t stop you from posting.
I do know more than the posters here because I actually own and ride the horse and experience the barn conditions. None of you do. But you seem to think you do and are unwilling to be told what you’re saying isn’t applicable to the situation.
You respond by mentioning your mare. Your mare isn’t my horse and any trainer would agree that what you post doesn’t apply. So goes the armchair trainers on COTH.
I assume you support non-horsie youth blanketing horses. Good for you.
@J-Lu, this statement from your OP has caused a lot of confusion. I think maybe there are two ways to read it:
Your horse didn’t damage the run-in until they added the mare (i.e., it’s not true that he damaged the run-in, until the mare arrived) <— I think this is the more natural interpretation and how most people here have read it
The BOs didn’t add the hot wire until they added the mare (i.e., it’s not true that there was hot wire, until the mare arrived), and your horse hasn’t damaged the run-in at all
Then in your most recent post you wrote:
Was his food moved closer to the existing hot wire after the mare arrived? Is that how the quotes above fit together?
Blanketing aside, I would not be thrilled about my horse being fed in an enclosed space next to hot wire. Assuming the perimeter fence is also hot, what about a feed pan on the ground in the paddock rather than a feeder attached to the run-in wall or the fence?
Have we heard anything about the shed painting and the hot wire that was run to block the painted side of the run-in off? I don’t remember reading that anywhere, but maybe I missed it? It sure seems like another important detail that may have been conveniently omitted from the tale of the unqualified daughter and the perfect horse.
@J-Lu, which hot wire did your horse accidentally hit? The new one blocking off the painted part of the run-in shed or the one that was already there?
