Well, when you’re sweating through the coat, that’s even more gross. 
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I don’t know if any of these would qualify for your book, but all are remembered fondly by me.
I’m still good friends with former trainer/friend.
All took place in the early 90s.
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There was a 2nd Year Green class that was considered among trainers to be their class exclusively, to show off clients’ horses.
Silly me, told my trainer/friend I’d show my TB in the class. We took 2nd in a class of Pros…
Who all came hustling over - with much clutching of pearls - to my friend to ask:.
"Why was SHE riding the horse?
I love him to this day for his answer:
"Because he’s her horse.
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Trainer/friend asked if I’d loan my horse to a Jr client of his for Medals. Kid & I were both showing at the same show that weekend.
I did & through no fault of horse, she placed, but not Top 3.
She left the ring, got off & tossed him the reins.
Clearly, a Flounce was intended
He asked her if she was going to thank me, got no answer & called after her:
“You realize you were loaned a $40K horse!”
Truth, as a BNT had made that offer to me a year before at a clinic she taught.
Kid’s parents were in earshot. The horse they had bought her was in the low 4s. At least they had the sense to look shocked. -
I was done showing when a Fun Class was about to take place: Trainers Bareback
I was putting my horse away when T/F asked if he could use him in the class.
The expression on my horse’s face when instead of his stall, he was back in the ring NAKED! with T/F aboard plainly said
"What is wrong with this picture?
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There was a very very nasty girl in the show scene growing up, we were tweens approximately. Rumor was, the nasty girl’s mother was embezzling money, got caught, and stopped paying the lease on the very fancy pony, who was assigned to another girl.
Before a show, the nasty girl offered to braid the pony’s tail, as a kind of send off and goodbye. The next morning, everyone is lining up and getting ready to load, and the trainer is screaming for some reason next to the pony. She’s holding up a huge chunk of his tail.
The girl had squirted Nair into the tail, resulting in about half of it falling out! The poor pony had to wear a false tail for the rest of the season and also had a couple sores.
I never saw the nasty girl again, but her mother was arrested for fraud a few months later.
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Oh I’ve definitely had a trainer pull a shoe on a horse that I was leased out and I was coming up to see what was going on because she was making up from fun shennanigans about the horse acting like it was sick or dying. Turns out it was just not sound and earning its keep as much bc, that’s right, she and the lease kid crippled it with some nonsense and not bothering to pick its feet. Horse rehabbed and came back, but I suspect it just wasn’t responding as well to whatever they were drugging it with to keep it comfortable.
Drove hours. Couldn’t sit on it because it had “lost a shoe” and farrier didn’t come on weekends. Didn’t bother to tell me and I arrived to find out with the barn worker looking confused and mentioned that it had been off for at least a day or 2. Right about the same time when I had informed her that I was coming up for the weekend for a visit and to ride.
How do I know it’s BS? She called my Dad a week later trying to hit him up for money to pay for horse’s board. My Dad, being a huge fan of the horse and not born yesterday, told her it was my horse and I paid the bills, but that given he was “so sick and dying” according to recent reports given by her to his daughter, it was probably best he lived out his “last days” by us and that he should be shipped home immediately and that she could bill him for that shipping but he expected the horse to be home by end of week. He hung up with her and promptly called me at work and informed me horse was coming home and to have trainer get him a stall. Given that my Dad did not ever really call the shots with any of my horse’s care and just usually paid bills, I just said, “Ok. Can’t wait til he gets here”… and hung up. Horse was totally fine. Spent a year on and off lame but totally healthy, just somewhat out of shape. Got retired happily after about a year or so of trying to keep him sound. Horse lived another 6 years until he was kicked in the shoulder in a herd kerfuffle. So yeah… Not sick. Not dying.
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At one point, there was a crazy bunch of pony mom mafia antics happening where ponies tails were being cut and all kinds of nonsense happening. Think it centered around the 2010-2015 timeline and probably most of it was around Pony Finals since it was like the freaking Minion Olympics.
If you google it, you can probably find some stories.
Some were pretty outrageous… think they had some that really teetered on safety threats to the kids and animals, which I thought was obnoxious and heinous.
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This thread had some interesting moments: Top Ten Quotable Quotes from the brain dead at small shows.
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I think I repressed a lot of them, most of the weekend memories kept popping back up. The number of times I thought “I can’t believe I did that” or “I can’t believe I tolerated that” over the weekend…
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Interesting. My kids were riding ponies back then. I remember “Tail Gate” at Pony Finals 2012 where a few fake tails were stolen.
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New lesson student, 7 yo, has tales of riding her Mom’s horses. There are several horses. One is the student’s special favorite.
Parents come at end of lesson, instructor making casual chat “I hear you have horses!” Mom & Dad look blankly startled. Student, on foot after ride, disappears behind horse.
Dad finally says, “There are several on the shelf in her bedroom. That’s all we have!”
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Kudos for imagination, kid, but I see a talk about honesty in her future (I hope!).
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Dad’s answer explained why a kid who supposedly has had exposure to horses knew almost nothing about riding, or horses, at all. Even sloppy backyard riding.
Kept dropping the reins and the leadline. Something else caught her attention, the line/reins just hit the ground. Dropped the leadline while leading the horse from A to B. Even while on the horse, while at a halt, dropped the reins out of her hands and sat in the saddle, no reins.
Unfamiliar with ‘whoa’ or stopping a horse. Didn’t know to pull back on the reins.
Definitely signs that something was way off. However there are people who own horses and don’t know how to handle them, so maybe.
She honestly didn’t know that horses don’t behave the way her shelf horses behave – that is, wait to move until she moved them. That she couldn’t just run off for lunch and leave the horse standing there, and it would be there when she got back.
I think she may have thought that shelf horses and real horses are almost the same thing. Well, lessons will help! 
She’s 7. She’ll gather more information as she goes. 
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I have a young student, 7 or 8, who kept talking about her horses at home to the other kids (never to me). Some of the other kids, and once a substitute instructor, came to me talking about this student’s horses she had at home. I was confused, because she was telling the other kids “oh, I had to care for so and so before I came here” or “I was helping my friend ride her horse at my house” and while I know some of my students have horses at home, I wasn’t sure about this one. I did know that her older sister had ridden somewhere else for a long time, so I felt it was plausible that maybe they had horses at home. I finally asked her when I heard her talking about a new pony that she had gotten for Christmas, if these horses were real that she had at her house. She said oh no, not real, I just pretend and practice at home. She’s running a whole pretend barn and riding school at her house, and she apparently takes her duties very seriously because she was telling one of the kids about needing a day off! 
I don’t really fault her or even feel like she is really “lying” to anyone, because she knows everything is pretend, and I used to run pretend horse shows and have barns full of fake horses when I was a kid too. Hopefully she’ll keep doing it and one day it will become the real thing.
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I’ve got video sent by a mom of a 10 yo student jumping a course in her living room. Trot circle at the beginning and end of the course. Picking up the canter, getting the leads and everything.
I’m all for it (as long as she doesn’t trip on a broom handle / vertical & faceplant), she was actually giving herself some good practice experience! 
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This reminds me of a kid who came back from vacation at the beach. While there, she ran into a lesson mate of hers, and they took turns cantering along the beach jumping a jump and teaching. The video I was shown has one kid imitating me while the other jumps “Are you COUNTING?!” (Her rhythm). At least they’re listening!!
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I had an entire ranch where the horses grazed in the backyard and ran feral in the woods behind the house. I even had a pedigree book with illustrations. I broke Mustangs and jumped courses in the backyard and cantered around.
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IMO the point of shelf horses is to allow kids (and adults!) to maintain a horse herd, without the expense and the logistics of maintaining a horse herd!
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I had little plastic horses. Then, there were ‘glass ones’ on the shelves that were not to play with. But I would make a ‘house’ out of large coffee table sort of books that the horses lived in. I do remember I would put one over the other and say ‘mate, mate, mate’. I have no idea where that came from. My mom told me later she would stand beyond to door, and laugh her head off. I can only think it was because we had neighbor boys that I played with. We played with plastic dinosaurs.
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Or “present your tits like a porn star would,” said to me by the very good friend who got me back into riding… while her 14 year old daughter was also in the arena, poor kid!
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We did this at pony camp one year when the kids made pool noodle horses. They gave them names, personalities and everything. A couple were even stoppers. I was the judge for the show 
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Oh god, is it bad that I’m 36 and still “canter” “jumps” at the beach with the kids? Were we supposed to outgrow that? =)
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