If the barn owner and/or trainer are USEF members, then yes, for sure Safe Sport rules will apply. That’s where most of the damage would happen, I’m sure
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I was the resident “barn rat/lesson kid” at my trainer’s farm in the late ‘00s, early 2010s. The farm was 45 minutes away from home, so until I got my license at 16, I was at the mercy of my working parents’ schedules when it came to barn trips. I usually spent weekends almost entirely at the barn. My mom would drop me off in the morning and pick me up late afternoon. I’d spend that time scrubbing buckets, picking stalls, learning to wrap/clip, watching my trainer give lessons to boarders or put pro rides on their horses. Her program was majority privately owned horses with exactly two lesson horses. Those horses had other lesson kids than just me, so typically they were either spoken for or resting on days when I could have hacked around. My trainer was a tough-as-nails, old school horseman who gave me a lot of latitude to learn in the barn, but even she didn’t want the liability of a pre-teen bombing around unsupervised.
Nowadays, I do have my own horse and board at a facility with a large lesson program (mostly eventing or straight dressage, with the odd hunter like myself thrown in). These lesson students are some of the hardest working, humblest kids I’ve met. Most of them, though, don’t own their own horses. The lesson program is at max capacity. Trainer just had to reset her voicemail to state that they are full and no longer accepting new lesson clients. These kids don’t get many opportunities to ride outside of lessons simply because the demand is so high. The schedules are carefully managed to be fair to the horses.
So sure, we can lament the fact that kids these days no longer ride outside of lessons. We should also acknowledge that riding outside of lessons is a privilege attached to either owning their own horse, or being in a program with sufficient horsepower to allow that.
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Yup. And as for riding outside the ring, that land just doesn’t exist anymore. The “pasture” usually already has horses in it and its not big enough for kids to ride safely among them. It’s also incredibly hard to keep pastures healthy when your at max-capacity on limited acreage & believe in turning horses out. Most barn owners don’t want kids out there tearing them up any more than the loose horses already are.
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Checking your state’s Food and Ag code should be your first stop.
This is California’s code on the subject. https://law.justia.com/codes/california/2009/fac/24000-24018.html
If you have a local problem you ask your State Ag Dept to do an inspection.
I’m happy to hear that there are still barns with big strings of lesson horses out there, and of course it’s much harder to ride outside of lessons if you don’t own or lease a horse.
But I’d bet most of the horses getting sedated for shows, or lunged into the ground to make them quiet enough to pack a sack of potatoes around, aren’t lesson horses but rather horses that are owned by people who are fortunate enough to have their own mount … and want one fancy/athletic enough to win stuff when they’re not up to the task as a rider.
Re: preteens bombing around unsupervised, I don’t necessarily think it’s unreasonable for barn to not want young children running around out of control getting in trouble, but a 13- or 14- year old kid should be mature enough to school an appropriate horse without needing eyes on them 100% of the time.
And re: riding out, while I suppose a landlocked barn where the pastures are small and already overcrowded and overgrazed might understandably not want people riding in them … it certainly doesn’t apply everywhere, and riding every now and then on an established pasture when the horses aren’t turned out (ours are in the barn most of the day in the summer for example) and the ground is solid isn’t going to do much damage; people rode on grass footing all the time in the past. The truth is that opportunities for riding outside of rings may well be harder to find than in the past, but they do exist … however it is something a lot of programs either don’t prioritize or even actively discourage, and IMO that’s leading to a lot of riders with weak seats that can’t handle themselves when things don’t go according to plan. In trying to eliminate the risks inherent in riding they remove many of the opportunities to learn to be a good rider.
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My understanding of the SafeSport MAAP guidelines is that you’re OK if there are two kids and one adult or two adults and one adult, AKA the rule of three. So working students fine as long as there are two or more kids or an extra adult in addition to the trainer.
But I could be wrong as it’s been almost a year since my last training. Though it is something I paid attention to as we had parents who would drop their 14 year olds off at the barn unsupervised on Sunday afternoons when the person who taught that day was either gone or out of earshot. I figured that as long as both kids were dropped off I was OK. But if there was only one that I shouldn’t be there. Not sure what I was supposed to do in that situation—leave everyone out and run to my car??? 
Editing to add that, in the era of SS, I can see people being more careful and going beyond the guidelines.
Even without safesport, liability insurance has rules about minors and supervision. Kids can’t just be left to run amok unsupervised around horses.
What is “supervision” though? Does it mean nobody under 18 should ever handle a horse outside of a structured environment where there are eyes on them at all times? Or is it acceptable to say, let a 16-year-old kid ride their horse in the arena without anybody directly watching them, but where there are people nearby in the barn that can look in on her from time to time, and are in earshot to hear if something goes wrong? There’s a big continuum between never letting them ride outside of lessons and letting small children run wild on their ponies on the back 40 with no adults in the general vicinity.
Our barn rule is no children under the age of 13 can be here without parental or adult supervision. For older kids, they can be here, but we keep an eye on them. Not for trouble making so much, but for safety in general. We have a set of barn rules that we have people sign, and we enforce it. Most kids are pretty good. The teen agers we have here are serious show riders, and rule followers. It’s the younger kids you have to watch. And some adults, but that’s something else all together
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I really don’t know of any barn that prohibits riding a horse you own outside of lessons. The only exceptions I’ve seen are an investment greenie for the kid’s future, or maybe one working through a problem, but those kids usually have something else to hack if they can get to the barn.
Usually kids aren’t riding on non-lesson days because they have cheer or soccer or cotillion or some other non-horsey thing.
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That would be for the lawyers to decide. Why would I want to take that risk? Around here, barns that lease their lesson horses to kids seem to have “lease blocks” where an adult/coach is around to supervise, but they aren’t in a lesson. Kids on their own horses can have a parent stay and watch if adults won’t be around otherwise. I think insurance policies can in some ways be vague on purpose, so they can then argue liability. To me supervision, means someone is in visual range of the child at all times.
True.
But, at some point as an amateur, it’s neither my circus or my monkey. If someone was likely to get hurt I would intervene. But leaving a horse that ties well in the cross ties for two hours while you and your friend look at your phones and giggle? Meh. I checked on the horse periodically but knew by then that there was no point in saying anything to either child or the parents.
And started avoiding Sunday afternoons.
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That seems like a very reasonable policy. And I’ll bet those teenagers benefit a lot from having some degree of independence and self-sufficiency, both in terms of their riding skills and in terms of their life coping skills.
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Leaving a horse to stand in the crossties while the human farts around and/or takes forever is one of my absolute biggest horsemanshit pet peeves.
If I were being nice, I would put the horse back in its stall so that he could eat his hay in peace and they could have a brief heart attack thinking he up and left.
The other option is horse gets hidden in the back fkn 40, and the kids can stand on a 2x2 floor tile in the tack room without moving from it for an hour and see how they like it before anyone will tell them where to go get him.
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I’ll fuss at kids for leaving their horses in the crossties too long. Not sorry.
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Agree. Drives me crazy.
The kids were actually mostly within sight of the horse.
And things had reached the point with them that, shall we say, the situation might be best explained via PM. I was likelier to end up in trouble than the kids if I touched the horse. And fussing at the kid had zero effect.
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Leaving horses unattended on crossties for an extended period of time is a violation of our rules! We’ll get right after the offender. Ditto if they leave a big mess. I have been known to untack and put the horse in it’s stall. Breaking our rules to often usually gets you a thanks, it’s been real, now you gotta go. Captain Kirbydog runs a tight ship
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Would have been nice if that had been the case here, but it wasn’t.
I’ve seen grown-ass adults do this too, and it pisses me off! Or when I’m trying to get a horse untacked (or to the wash stall when it’s hot, or blanketed when it’s very cold), someone will call me over and ask me to watch a video on their phone or something. Like can’t you wait? The horse is not a car! Plus, people need to use the crossties. Crossties are prime real estate in a barn, and clearing the aisle ASAP is also a good policy.
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I rode (briefly) at a very large barn (probably 100 horses across 3 barns + paddocks) that did not have crossties and didn’t allow you to tie your horse in the barn at all. I’m almost certain it was because of the logistical headache of having so many horses regularly being in crossties while they were trying to drive the hay truck/honeywagon down the aisles, but in the wintertime had the added benefit that kiddos/adults alike were usually pretty prompt about getting their horses tacked/untacked quickly.
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