Just like the coffee break room at the office…
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No, not your place to say anything to the other boarder(s) unless its dangerous. You are welcome to share what somebody else’s carelessness did to your poor, leashed puppy. Good thing it wasn’t somebody’s unleashed 7 year old child thinking it was an ice cream treat.
But the merely annoying things? Keep quiet lest you get dubbed the trash nazi and taken even less seriously by the offending boarders then you are now. Some people just don’t care, you won’t change that, just make trouble for yourself.
You know…it’s not just some rich kids who make the mess…not by a long shot. Up to tne BO/BM, assuming they care. Be surprised how many don’t really give a rats hinny about such things, Might have to try several barns before finding the right fit for you and your horse management preferences. Took me quite a few, more expensive doesn’t always mean better managed either. Boils down to the attitude management projects about common courtesy and barn rules, they don’t really care, nobody else will either.
It generally took about a year to realize they didn’t care. Often that attitude takes longer to show up then bad practices but it drives you nuttier then skipped feedings and empty water buckets. Then you know you need to just leave. If it’s an underlying attitude on the part of management , you just sit in misery thinking you are overreacting until one day you wise up. Then relize what the problem was after you move and feel that weight coming off your shoulders from putting up with the place for so long.
My barn has ledges running all down the aisle at each stall. People LOVE to set their water bottle/coffee cup/drink can/gloves/brushes/hoof picks/etc on these ledges, and then LEAVE THE STUFF THERE. Drives me crazy. I am constantly dumping out old coffee and throwing out the cups.
Even better is when someone realizes they left their junk there, and comes back to the barn a week later asking if I’ve seen their glove/crop/brush? I left it here a week ago. . . but now it’s gone . . .
Don’t leave stuff on stall ledges, people! I will throw it out!
After a few pointed Facebook posts and signs in the barn, people are getting better about it. People are also (generally) good about sweeping their spot in the aisle, which is another pet peeve of mine.
But I swear I have a couple boarders that think that because they pay board they have no obligation to help keep the barn tidy. Refuse to pick up their poop in the arena, only sweep the aisle if someone is actively watching them, etc. I am not asking you to muck stalls, just clean up after yourself and your horse!
I actually know of barns that took the opposite approach to what many suggested and REMOVED all trash cans. Boarders want to use the barn as a trash dump? Fine, there is now nowhere to throw anything out and you have to take it all home. There will be hell to pay if you are caught leaving garbage. People straighten up pretty quickly when they have to take wormer tubes/old horse shoes etc home in their car to throw out.
I hate to say it the worst offenders are woman. I have been in the food service industry and the women’s bathroom is much more likely to be trashed. They manage to not be able to find that trashcan for the paper towel and drop it next to it. Flushing all kinds of stuff they would never dream of flushing at home. Leaving diapers on the sink or on the changing table. Many of these women have homes that are absolutely pristine and they don’t have a housekeeper. I don’t know what it is about women in public. I see this in the office too.
I can’t tell you how many times there is a roll of toilet paper that is 1/4 used and nobody can be bothered to put it on the little roller thing. We are talking at an office or barn that has 8-10 people. We all know each other. How hard it is to change the toilet paper while you are doing your thing on the toilet? Not like you should be doing much else with your hands while you sit on the toilet. (Talking on the phone unless on a Bluetooth is just gross and don’t talk to me about texting on the pot)
It is like some women are so fed up cleaning their own home, picking up after their boss/husband/children etc… that they figure somebody else can pick up after them for a change. Yes it is a big generalization but it is the only reasonable explanation I can come up with.
Cleaniness in a barn seems to be a culture that comes from the top down and how well and consistently it is enforced. I think it is harder in barns that have multiple trainers and not everyone answers directly to the BO or to one single BM. Each trainer can have different rules for their client so nobody wants to be with Trainer A but constantly cleaning the wash stall after Trainer B’s client has left it bombed.
The bigger the barn the tougher it is to enforce because it is easy to blame somebody else due to the amount of traffic. In a larger barn you are much more likely to have more barn help/grooms/barn staff so it can be rationalized as being the paid help’s job not the boarder’s responsibility.
Oh, yes… the crosstie area with the piles of hoofpickings and hair and the halter still dangling from one of the cross-ties…
I really don’t want to have to either stand in your mess while I groom my horse, or clean up after you before I groom my horse. “I was going to do it after I rode” doesn’t cut it unless it’s your own personal space.
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Um ew.
I’ll be the first to admit, I’m the worst when it comes to remembering random little things. I’ve frequently left a bridle hanging on a hook in the common areas, especially if someone starts chatting with me while I’m untacking.
But plates of food? Used dewormer tubes? Stop it. There’s a difference in being a bit cluttered and being disgusting. And dewormer is highly toxic to dogs, put that ish in the trash. I lost a lot of faith in humanity reading about your fellow boarders.
I don’t think it’s really your place to say anything to the other boarders. But, perhaps you could convince the BO to put up big signs in the areas frequently left a mess?
I quite like Bluey’s solution better than the alternate. There is little that is more annoying than having to hunt down a trash can at a barn.
This is an interesting position. Also having worked in the food industry for many years, I’ll have to disagree with you. My experience was quite the opposite, with the men’s restrooms always being way more of a pig-sty than the women’s’.
I find that, a lot of the time when paper towels are on the floor, it’s because women open the door to leave using a paper towel for sanitation reasons, and then attempt to toss it into the trash can several feet away while holding the door open. Easily solved by placing a trashcan right by the door.
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Thanks for the reality check, everyone. Being a boarder been a weird adjustment for me sometimes – I’m so used to being the safety/trash nazi and I know how much it sucks. There is one boarder that I try to avoid riding with (she’s a nice woman, but OMG her kids drive me nuts) and if I’m at the barn after her on the weekend it tends to look like a bomb went off. When I’m at the barn on weeknights after the BO has done her usual cleaning it’s neat as a pin. It’s nice having a BO who tries to keep things nice and takes excellent care of the horses. I have no plans to move, especially since the other local barns that I’m familiar with have somewhat questionable horsemanship practices.
The puppy is pretty much back to normal, thankfully. He’s currently getting his daily grooming from the cat.
Think you will learn if the horse care is good in a boarding barn, you can put up with a whole lot of things that really don’t matter in the great scheme of caring for horses. Even if they annoy the crap out of you, nobody is going to die and the horses are well cared for.
Nothing worse then a fancy place with impeccable cleanliness and scatterbrained horse management that feeds when they get around to it and forgets things…like filling water buckets or dropping your pre bagged supplements in or dropping them is in another horses feeder while giving yours that ones meds. Boarding is compromise, pick your battles wisely.
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My daughter was the barn manager at a boarding/lesson barn and supervisor of the school. She received an email from an absolutely irate mother stating that her daughter, a lesson kid, would not be cleaning up any more manure left in the aisle by her lesson pony. Mother was outraged when daughter told her mother that daughter had been asked to clean up after her pony. Mother insisted that daughter would no longer be performing that task regardless of barn rules (instructor had told kid that barn rules meant daughter had to clean up). My daughter told the mother that lesson kid would be required to clean up after her pony FOREVER and that if mother could not deal with that it was time to move on to another barn. Insert my daughter’s eye roll here.
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When I run into someone who doesn’t clean up their horse’s manure I already know everything I need to know about them and my mind will never be changed.
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Its very much a barn - culture thing. One place I boarded at was fabulous with having strong, LIDDED trashcans and shared-use brooms and shovels in decent shape in convenient places so no one has any excuses to not clean up after themselves.
A different barn however, had like one beat up - no-lid trash can for l50 stalls and didn’t supply shovels or rakes for cross ties or wash stalls. It was a messy disaster. Piles of manure would just sit there, attracting flies and getting eventually stamped into gross manure dust. Even when saintly boarders at the end of their rope bought a muck rake and shovel for the cross ties, some people wouldn’t use them. They never HAD to clean up after their horse - so why start now? I was also always cleaning up stray pieces of trash that were either dragged out of the un-lidded can by crows or blew out since it was so over-filled. so aggravating.
Haha! I have to say though, that I would not generally want boarders picking stalls or topping off water buckets. Stalls because they take out so many clean shavings with the poop that they might as well use a shovel, plus I will think the horses are all impacted, and water because I will think the horses are all dehydrated.
Clean up after yourself is kind of a no-brainer though. Too bad there are so many people with no brains…
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I feel ya!
When I boarded, I did always pick my horse’s stall out if on stall rest or if I just didn’t feel like going home yet. Always told the BO though, or they were usually there at the time I did it. But, not everyone picks out stalls the same and yes to the bedding waste!
Definitely agree about the water! At least tell someone if you fill them. Water monitoring is muy importante. Also, as a BO, it can be annoying when I was getting ready to go scrub buckets/troughs, then go out to find that now I have completely full buckets/troughs to dump in order to scrub them. I truly appreciate the thoughtfulness, but hate wasting water!
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Yes! I feel the same way about wasting water and try to time my bucket/trough cleaning accordingly. Thankfully I don’t have boarders, but I do have lessees that occasionally cause trouble trying to be helpful. :winkgrin: I appreciate the effort though.
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New place has a few recording cameras covering the aisles and arenas. Nobody’s watching them full-time and enforcement is extremely low-key, but I gather it’s pretty easy for the BM to skim through the recording until they find where the giant pile of crap in the aisle came from or who “borrowed” a saddle or whatever.
You also need a BM who’s willing to enforce rules, but it solves the “nobody knows who…” problem handily.
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