My winter vacations are less about the weather and more for the horse’s sake. That’s just me personally though!
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Love this shadow when I zoom in on Google Maps.
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It would be more likely for horses to get time off, or at least a lighter riding schedule, in the summer in SoCal.
(In case anyone’s wondering, yes I’ve been in Massachusetts for 29 years, but before that I was mostly in Southern California. I’m a third generation native on my dad’s side.)
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Yeah, the “winter breaks” I try for as little interaction as I can muster. That wouldn’t be possible if the horse is getting almost zero interaction if it isn’t from a human.
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How many acres are there for the 500 horses on the property?
Thanks.
That’s why I said 10#s in the 5# bucket. That’s over 6 horses an acre. I can’t even imagine.
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I think this was said upthread but it’s also used as a show facility for a variety of disciplines. The barns you see on the east side of the property are used for shows.
Turnouts are tiny.
It’s basically expected that people with horses boarded in these situations will do something to get the horse out daily, whether it’s by them, a trainer, or someone else.
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As others have said - it’s a very different type of horsekeeping from most of the rest of the country. There isn’t a lot of flat open space in the LA basin, coastal OC/SD. I had a relative that lived in Vegas on a pretty standard suburban sized lot with 2 horses in his backyard. Your horse will either be ok with it or they won’t and you’ll have to make difficult choices.
My one trainer in Michigan had convinced herself that neither of her show horses would be allowed have enough room that they could hurt themselves in turnout yeehawing around. No amount of gentle suggestions from several of us that they only yeehaw around because they NEVER get out convinced her until she ended up taking them to her new place and they lived out. Took a couple days and guess who were fine? She was done showing so she didn’t care so much if they dinged themselves. One lived in the SoCal equivalent - a probably a 12x20 stall with a run in that was about the same size. I felt bad for that horse as he looked over the green pastures that all the other horses were turned out in all day long. He was a pretty miserable horse to handle on the ground.
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She’s the wurst (German humor)… and the worst.
Even the rabbits don’t want to hang around with her. It’s bad when vermin think you’re the problem.
It’s a very different type of horse keeping then some of us are used to. I guess the alternative is nobody is allowed to own a horse if it can’t be turned out on x acres? Which would then eliminate horse ownership for a lot of people in population dense areas. I think a lot of horses adapt to it well and if they don’t then they get sold to a different location. Regarding grass, when I lived in CO there was more turnout but the same lack of grass. It’s just the location.
Regarding exercise, there are a shocking TON of backyard barns in this area all with the exact same lack of turnout. People do a lot of city trail riding almost daily for exercise. I follow a FB profile and she’s always going through the Taco Bell drive through on horseback.
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Different indeed. I don’t think I could do it. Feels too much like keeping a leopard at the zoo and saying “well it’s better than nothing, I guess.”
It blows my mind that board is so expensive, and the stalls look like absolute garbage, too. Crazy.
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I remember seeing a couple of people on horses lined up at the drive-through at a local ice cream stand when I drove by on a summer evening a year or two ago. It looked like a fun outing.
It was a very rural area, so they might have just come from right up the street for all I know.
Years ago on a business trip to LA I went on a guided trail ride out of LAEC over to a Mexican restaurant via Griffith Park. It was well before I got back in to horses so my riding was extremely rusty. Not gonna lie, the tunnel scared the crap out of me because it got really dusty so I couldn’t see that far ahead of me. Someone ahead then spooked which startled the rest of us but then everyone calmed down.
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My favorite local trail system has tunnels. They are spooky!! The aren’t as long as the one under that LA freeway is though, that has to be pretty wild.
Is it too woke for me to say I don’t think that we should be keeping horses in those conditions if it’s truly the only option?
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You would eliminate thousands of people on both coasts from owning horses then. There are many locations besides LAEC where space is at a premium and a lot of those places are where the jobs are and where people can afford horses.
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I lived at a unicorn property when I was 19. Right in the middle of Reseda (San Fernando Valley part of LA, for those who aren’t familiar), I lived on two acres surrounded by houses. I had a horse and boarded another so he would have company (and it paid for hay). I went back there a few years ago, and that piece of land had six or more big houses on it.
When we lived there, I rode in the pasture, but my boarder would put a bridle on her mare and ride bareback through the subdivions. She was brave!
Unfortunately, first DH and I were renters, and we wanted to own a house. The rental house was a converted one car garage and shared the property with the main house, had no heat, and shared the small water heater with the main house, so it wasn’t a sustainable situation. We ended up buying a house in Kagel Canyon in Lake View Terrace (far north boundary of LA) but couldn’t afford to board the horse, so he was sold. Hansen Dam was nearby, and I rode around the lake at the rental stable there for the two years I lived in Lake View Terrace.
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Put another way, you would eliminate thousands of horses, end stop.
Was it my most favorite way of keeping horses? Not at all. Was my horse climbing the walls, a stressball mess, or visibly unhappy? Not even one bit.
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