New to horses

Hello all,

I am new in the horse world and would want to know what I can expect.
Therefore the question, what are your top daily frustrations?
And what keeps you awake at night?

Thanks for your help :slight_smile:

You’re going to have to be a little more specific to get useful answers.

Time to ride and weather

My horses’ health and how I’m going to pay for it all.

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Define “new to the horse world” & you’ll get better answers :wink:
New rider?
New owner?
Or?

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This feels like a bot/AI poster?

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I asked AI if this one of them, got this reply

However, the provided search results do not contain information specifically about a person or entity named “David dd9123”. It is possible that “David dd9123” is a different individual or entity not referenced in these sources. Therefore, based on the information provided, it’s not possible to definitively state if “David dd9123” is an AI.

true plausible deniability :joy:

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Im sorry, I meant as an owner yes. Either having the horse in your ‘garden’ or at a livery yard.

What’s your background with horses? Are you boarding or keeping a horse a home? Do you have a trainer?

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The ability or lack of to keep up with the rising cost of vet bills keeps me awake at night. And I don’t begrudge my vet one cent of what she charges.

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@Scaramouch

I agree. There is the exact same post on the horse and hound forum. Bit strange.

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Take a stack of money, like a lot of money
 
then set it on fire. If this bothers you do not get into horses :rofl:

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that is how I convinced wife to get rid of our landline phone, I got $650 in one dollar bills then stacked that into a mountain on the table so she could see the annual cost

On the other hand most of our friends thought we were nuts getting horses for our kids, that was until it was found we owned the mineral rights of the land we purchased to keep their horses on.

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This is good. And I’m being playful ok? No really. You are new and you are wise if you have already picked up that this passion comes with frustrations. Failures, questioning sanity, throwing money out the window - practice that - take a wad of 20’s and just go driving and throw them slowly out the window.

But really. Tell us more. I’ve had horses 40 years and it’s an addiction. Yes. It could be worse though.

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If you keep horses at home, a frustration is finding the time to ride. If you are brand new to horses this likely sounds counterintuitive, since the horses are right there and theoretically available any time.

But there are always fences to mend, arenas to be dragged, jumps to repair, pastures to mow, manure to muck and dispose of, feed and hay to buy and store, water troughs to clean, tractors and trailers to service, farriers and vet visits to plan and wait for, and countless other diversions to occupy time that you’d like to be riding.

image

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So

Are you considering buying or leasing?
Already bought/leased?
Will you be/are you boarding your horse?
Are you a new rider?
Riding with a trainer?
Answers to the above will get you more info.

For myself, as a rider of 50+yrs, owner since 1989, kept them at home for 20yrs:
No daily frustrations, weather making life with horses more or less difficult.
When any of my current 3 are NQR, that keeps me up nights.

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Right now my frustration is with neighbors setting off fireworks and it sounds like a war is going on.

My other frustration is how expensive everything has gotten.

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Top frustrations are how expensive it is to have horses in my area, how there is constantly decreasing space/access for riding on public land, the challenge of finding good trainers (though frankly, Ride IQ has helped a bit with that) and that there is a limited number of good barns with knowledgeable, professional, educated, mentally healthy barn managers, and with good turnout. And then there is the frustration that in order to afford a horse, many of us will need a job that pays well, which can mean a long/intense work day, before that one-hour-each-way drive to the barn at the end of the day.

What keeps me up at night is knowing all of the former, but also knowing that I love having horses be a part of my life, but I’m getting older, and some days I wonder what will my future with horses look like. , But generally, I just don’t dwell on what’s out of my control, and all is well. Paddock Wood’s poster is entirely accurate. :slight_smile:

The actual horse stuff – the dirt, the frustrations of dealing with a very large, intelligent, and opinionated animal, the love and connection with aforesaid animal, the stall cleaning, the grooming, the farm-girl fingernails, hair that smells like horse, bits of hay in my sweaty bra, and a car that smells like spilled flyspray and still has tiny bits of hay in the back from 2019 — I kind of love.

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for about ten years I was on several different advisory boards to improve equine access to public lands.

The US Forestry Service was specific to develop greater access to the LBJ Grasslands, to date there are about two hundred miles of improved trails on the Grasslands that were put in primarily with volunteer help under the oversight of the Forestry Service .

Locally in the city there are over two hundred miles of trails that are equine accessible most under the direction oversight of the Corps of Engineers on levee and wetlands .

Then there are Rails to Trails conversions of abandoned railroad right of ways in north Texas they eventually will all be interlinked providing nearly six hundred miles of trails

Many of the these trails conversions are a result of the the persistence of advisory boards to get a rails to trails act actually funded, we were able to insert such into the National Highway Act of 1991 ( Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991)

People have to be involved to get things done

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