A non-horse person would not know that the horse is the most intimidating since they do not do horse body language. All they see is a horse with a tail.
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Is this barn the easiest to get to from off the property? (ie, someone can sneak into it the easiest?)
Is this barn the quietest of the barns?
Do you have a lot of inter-personal issues at your barn?
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These are important questions, because it can help determine if this is an act of spite or perhaps someone in serious need of horse hair.
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Does the barn have security cameras? If no they need to get some installed.
You said neither the BO or BM did anything until the most recent chop job. It would seem like the first thing to do after the first would have been to post a very strongly worded email, and a notice on the white board of every barn that if there are any unauthorized haircuts, there will be X consequences. So it’s possible that it was a stupid teen playing horsey beauty salon.
I don’t keep abreast of stupid stuff teens do as Internet challenges, but I don’t think there’s enough of a market for horse hair jewelry to incur such a risk, and this is a pretty niche illegal thing to do. I don’t think one can subjectively determine the “intimidation” factor of a horse for a particular person, though. After all, they seem to have done what they were doing unscathed!
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I mean, if it’s someone going around cutting a few inches off so every horse looks like a fancy dressage horse, then it’s probably an overzealous teen with zero boundaries.
If it’s a whole tail, like several feet are gone, then it’s probably another horse person making fake tails to sell? Those are not cheap.
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Overzealous teen or newbie adult with boundary issues. Do you have anyone who works at the barn just a few hours/one day a week? Or works off a lesson? I know two people who had really odd issues with their fill-in Monday grooms. And sometimes the veil of being an employee makes people feel empowered to do stupid things.
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The forelock and ergots are what I find most odd. I can understand the tail banging by an overzealous teen, especially in winter, if the tail got muddy and tangled, or if there were twigs/ice/stuff stuck in it. That might be seen as a “favor” 
Although I guess if the forelock was hanging in the horse’s eyes?
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Looks like not any length that the their could use for horse hair jewelry, for example.
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we have these around our farm. Around 100$ and we’ve found many uses for them. The batteries last an AMAZINGLY long time!
https://www.focuscamera.com/stealth-cam-2019-g42ng-24mp-no-glow-trail-camera-kryptek-camouflage.html?irclickid=yv51S33XVxyITq0wNpXVRx2RUkGwqGx5pwth2s0&utm_source=221109&utm_medium=Impact&utm_campaign=Focus%20Product%20Catalog%20Ad&irgwc=1
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The forelocks AND the ergots sound like they were part of the unsolicited grooming detail. A foot off of a tail isn’t the ideal length of hair to start with for making horsehair jewelry. Could be enough for tassels or something like that though. Sorry this happened. I’d be miffed.
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I would leave. Immediately. And probably alert the local community to what is happening and where. The first time, it could have been a stupid tween. Now it’s a serious safety issue, and considering how easy it is to get cameras in a barn (or anywhere) now, there’s no excuse for the BM to not have video evidence.
If it’s someone retaliating against specific horses/owners, its a probably a crazy employee and that’s a serious concern. What might they do next? Withhold water? Poison them?*
If it’s someone sneaking in from off property, then what else might they decide to take next time? An expensive saddle? The whole dang horse? And what if said person had been kicked and killed by one of the horses? The barn would have been liable, and whatever poor horse it was would probably be forced to be put down by AC.
I doubt it’s a fellow boarder or student because I’m sure that by this point news ‘traveled around’ so the student would have known it was wrong and didn’t do it again. And while people are crazy I can’t imagine a boarder having such a bone to pick with 4 boarders stretched out over this amount of time.
- One of my horses was given over 4x his normal grain ration one night, about 20-25 pounds of grain, because they didn’t like that I was pre-bagging his grain for him. The same night they left his stall door wide open so he could leave and wander onto a busy road that was nearby. Luckily he was a scaredy-cat and didn’t leave and I showed up about an hour after feeding to find what they had done.
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Holy crap! You said you discovered this was done by a disgruntled employee?
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Yes, I think at the behest of the trainer and owner. The barn was a very scary sh*tshow.
He is a harder keeper and the barn was supposed to be giving him 5 pounds of grain morning and night. But in reality they just gave him whatever they felt like that day. So one day he’d get the right amount, but the next meal he’d maybe only get a pound. Obviously not great. So I talked to the owner and told him what was going on, and that I was going to pre-bag his food with grain I would buy so it would be super easy to feed him. It was fine for a few days, and then they did this. I actually got absolutely LAUNCHED into space that night too because I didn’t know he had been given all that grain at first. I rode him and he tried to hold it together but then just kind of exploded. I luckily was fine, but knew something was wrong because he wasn’t like that. I then, on a whim, checked the tote in front of his stall where his grain was and found that they had given him all of the grain I had dropped off that morning in one feeding. Which was about 25 pounds of food. At first, I had just assumed the door wide open thing was a genuine mistake, but after I discovered the food thing I figured it probably wasn’t.
When I told the owner what happened he made a remark about that ‘that’s what happens when you don’t trust us’.
I have so many bad stories about that place (and Miami boarding barns in general) and I was only there for about 2 months. They also chased me with a golf cart screaming at me when I left. So that was fun.
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Is best to never confront anyone or leave a place by yourself.
Some people are then at their worst, the leaving owner or barn people left behind.
Neither has much to lose by then and tempers can fly.
Having a back up set of eyes with you is best, for both.
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I did, I was 17 at the time so my mom was with me. I actually talked to the owner very kindly, told him I thought maybe there was a miscommunication and explained that it was supposed to be one grain bag a meal, not all of them. That’s when I got the whole ‘didn’t trust us’ thing. I told them that next morning I would be leaving in the evening after work was over (I was paid through 2 months out, so wasn’t breaking any contracts) but then my mom and I showed up around noon, as I expected there to be a fight and I didn’t want one.
I was chased in the golf cart by the owner, who was married and in his 40’s, and the trainers daughter, who was my age and whom he was sleeping with. She screamed cuss words at me the whole time and attempted to run me over. I didn’t engage in it. There was no yelling or screaming on my part, you can’t argue with crazy.
I later found out from another boarder that the barn owner was pissed because he was going to lock the gate hold my horses hostage. He was planning on selling them.
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Stormy, you need to write a book about all your horse life! It could just be little vignettes like James Herriot did in his books. I love your tales even though I’m sad you had such horrible experiences. You’re a natural story teller, is what!
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Thank you! That is very nice.
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That’s when you call the cops if he did, in fact, hold your horses hostage. This sounds like barn I boarded at for a total of 3 weeks. The owner was nuts and was no stranger the local police because she had been arrested before for domestic violence. A boarder was leaving and BO got into it with her husband who kept his cool but she was going apesh__ on him and the cops had to be called. This was all in front of new boarders too.
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Wow, that’s crazy.
Luckily it didn’t come to that, I had a feeling they might try something which is why I came when they didn’t think I could; during school/work hours.
A barn I was at about 3 years ago had a similar thing happen. A boarder (who was a ditz, she opened a gate in a pasture that wasn’t hers and let all the horses out to gallop around at like 8:30 at night) called the cops because the barn owner was screaming at her. He was super pissed. I guess it wasn’t the first time that she had done something stupid. The cops came the next day when she packed up her stuff and left because she was afraid of him. It was a bad situation all around.
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