There are fewer and fewer lesson barns. The ones still around are often on very tight budgets and are run by people who might not have had much decent instruction themselves. When the student doesn’t really have a baseline of what is normal, it’s very easy to blame bad behavior on the student’s riding versus the horse.
Of course, yes, that is 100% true to some extent (referencing the earlier meme). But an instructor isn’t going to admit, “Pooky the pony is soured to the point she won’t canter unless the rider has legs of steel,” or “Frankie is an off-the-track Standardbred that even the trainer’s assistant riders can’t get to canter for more than half a ring,” or “Dobbin is footsore and does three lessons a day, and will stop if you so much as try to steer him off the rail and refuse to budge,” or “this horse’s tack doesn’t fit him properly, but the barn’s too broke to find him anything but this.”
Because beginner riders don’t know, and frankly, there is always something they are doing wrong because they are just learning, they don’t realize that even when they’re doing it right and not getting positive feedback from the horse that something else is up. And sometimes from the barn’s perspective, the objective is for the students to keep coming back and keep paying, rather than for the students to really learn.
I agree the situation is b.s. and the cart horse story, based on the little video I saw, sounds pretty suspicious. Some lesson barns love to tell the riders super-dramatic stories about the horses, and sometimes it’s easier to make up a story than untrain that behavior.
