Actually, I know of at least two barns in my area that do – one of which is where I ride. There are cameras covering one barn, the indoor, and I think the parking area, too. I know I was impressed! And will probably also never pee in any stall anywhere ever again.
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Okay, so @Whiterun and @HipNo34 have a sample size of two. Meanwhile, no barns that I am aware of in my region (NJ/tristate) have that “feature”. It simply isn’t common, and to imply that an owner should, in this tech age, know that their horse was being mistreated is disingenuous. Period.
(Edited: Owner, not owners)
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Weird. I have boarded exclusively in show barns, and I have never had stall cams. I think it’s a great pie in the sky option, but you representing it as something that is standard is incorrect.
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Where I am it is. To protect your investment, you have cameras. It’s not expensive considering what you could lose.
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First of all (re other comments above), I personally would not say the onus is on a boarder to be on top things 24/7 nor would I blame anyone, particularly in a client/boarder situation, for trainer/BO/staff’s treatment of their horse.
I don’t disagree that cameras and feeds are necessarily standard or common – yet. They’re not “pie in the sky” Star Trek stuff anymore, though either – not when Horse Illustrated is telling readers how anyone can “become a barn spy..”
The technology is changing and becoming more accessible and affordable.
10 or so years ago, it was my bar and restaurant clients setting up systems they could check on a laptop. Fast forward, I’ve got a family member, retired and on a seriously fixed income who’s got a camera set up so he can check in on his cat. I think he ordered it on Amazon.
The only surprise is that I was surprised my barn has a system.
Just google “camera livestream stable horse stalls security system.” 
One of the articles, from the UK, granted, even talks about systems that work with crap wifi:
I do live in the horsey hinterlands compared to the NY/NJ area. My trainer’s farm is a project in progress and she is methodically developing her small facility. She has a low-key lesson program and boarders hunt, trailside do local shows and the like. The other barn in my area, that I mentioned also having cameras (so technically a sample size of three, between Whiterun and me 
), has a fancier clientele so I was figuring, if this stuff has made it here, it’s got to be more prevalent ‘out there.’
A livefeed doesn’t help a horse in danger unless someone is watching. Most people I know (including me) board out their horses because they don’t have the time to keep up 24x7. So what good is your livestream supposed to be doing?
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We have cameras primarily to protect our vehicles (my husband) and to spy on the dogs (me). We used them whilst on holidays to make sure the cats were OK as one cat would hide from strangers.
Sometimes they catch some interesting behaviour. I’ll be moving one to watch my pregnant mare in Oct. Saves going outside at night every few hours.
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Surely if anyone had been on the property, they would have heard this horse making a racket. If you are watching a camera as an owner from afar, what would there be to do? Someone still has to get to the horse in time to do anything, if cutting him free could have been done safely at all.
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I wondered this myself.
Clearly a camera system isn’t an end-all, be-all solution, even if someone happened to be checking in at the right moment. But by some of the comments, I would wonder why anyone anywhere in any application would bother with a camera or security system at all if they don’t have Paul Blart napping in front of a bank of monitors 24/7. Are people watching their Rings or Nanny Cams live all the time? Doubt it. Can they still be useful? Sure, absolutely.
Some 40-odd years ago, a friend complained to me about how the new barn she had moved to had video cameras in the barn and covered arena. She felt as though her privacy was being invaded and resented the fact that the owner “could sit in her house and watch my every move.” My thoughts were, “What’s the big deal? Obey the barn rules and there won’t be a problem.”
I’ve never boarded at a place that had cameras in the barn but when my horse’s health was failing, I wished there was a camera on his stall so we could keep an eye on him (nighttime was rough).
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Even if you only check a few times a day, there’s great peace of mind in knowing everything looks ok. Instead of discovering an issue after 8 hours when it’s definitely too late to intervene, you have a chance of catching it sooner. If you’re far away hopefully there’s a family member, neighbor, fellow boarder, etc who can help—or you can get the vet on the way sooner.
I have cameras in my (private) barn and if I were extra worried about something I could keep the viewer open on my second monitor at work. You don’t have to literally stare at it all day to notice something amiss, especially if you have audio. I’ve done that before when a new horse is settling in. This morning one horse was acting a little weird as I was leaving so I checked on him several times over the next hour and was reassured.
I also like having a DVR so if I see evidence of an injury or something weird you can go back and see what’s happening. My young horse’s hay net ended up on the ground twice in one week and the first time I thought the twine was just old. After the second time I checked and realized he was pawing at it so I switched to a Nibble Net for safety.
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If the horse was supposed to be at a show, which it seems it was, why would you turn on a camera to watch an empty stall?
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I know you’re being cheeky, but what if you are at a show and someone puts their horse in your stall at home? 
Or a skunk walks in? Had that happened. 
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Answers. I know the person who invented the security system that’s at Thunderbird and she did it because her horse died horrifically on Christmas Eve. No one could’ve been around, or course, but to know what happened exactly would provide peace of mind to any horse owner.
I also have a friend who’s pony lost its eye because a cat jumped into its stall, pony spooked, caught on something. Sounds like insurance for BO’s and assurance for owners that nothing nefarious happened.
Clearly the reason we are all here on this thread, debating, is because we don’t have answers. Cameras would provide that in many different scenarios.
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Yeah – that’s what I ultimately thought, too!
To LSBC’s point below, in this particular situation, who would be looking if the horse was supposed to be at a show? I do get that but in general, I absolutely love the idea of being able to do spot checks. I’m all for Big Brother if it means being able to peek in on a colicky one, etc.
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What’s a float ?
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Pretty sure it’s Australian for horse trailer.
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I’m so glad you asked 
I was wondering, too, and too lazy to google (and yes, I did say earlier how much I appreciated what I was learning in this thread so facepalm).
I was thinking it was like a hay feeder or something but far from 100%.
Yes, horse floats are horse trailers. We also rasp a horse’s teeth, not float them. That often gets confused when we talk about horse floats - we mean moving them not giving them a dental!
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a bit late in life I realized that most of the traditional training like ask , ask harder now ask with pain, punishment, tieing, forcing a horse to stand still by slapping it , using pain like chains on a halter, etc to control a horse instead of taking time to teach a horse to lead, all not geared for how a horse thinks. I have a difficult horse, and in the end he just needed to learn to trust humans. He did learn that by having the crap yanked out of him " tieing him to think about it" force in training etc. I actually taught my horse to tie by just leaving the lead on the ground and increasing the time asked to wait. I taught him n ot to pull back by using a rope loop that I held the end in my hand ( not tied to a wall) and I could manage how tight the loop got and release when he came forward. This took like a few sessons no more than 5 minutes each. My horse leaned to wait and try and solve an issue on his own and how to release himself from pressure. Meanwhile people wanted me to tie him to a tire, a tree, and other abusive stuff that I know would have ended in a broken neck.
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