“But you have to value and enjoy the training process” is so accurate. From my perspective in my area, not many trainers enjoy doing that, nor do they know how.
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And, I guess I should add: You have to have the faith that the horse can, eventually learn to be quiet and relaxed. Some of that comes from the philosophy (as well as ability) to always look for the possible way of giving the horse a lighter aid when he seems to be listening. And lots of it comes from the experience of watching green horses slowly get better with good training from an educated, correct pro.
I can’t tell you how much time I spent setting poles for people while they trotted into a X with a cheat rail and quietly cantered out of a line. I learned to stop on a straight line and, if when I rode with an even better pro, wait until the horse exhaled at the halt before you walked off so that you know that he got it and had disposed of any adrenaline that jumping effort had created in him.
I had lots of lessons that were over poles or dinky little jumps. I had to do remedial things like teach horses to walk over cross rails (when they didn’t take responsibility for getting to the other side of a jump), or trotting to the base of a fence.
If I were lucky, I got to be part of doing grid work. There never seem to be enough poles or space or an arena where you can leave those up or someone to help set those for you, or someone who really knows what they are doing to create the right gymnastic for the horse as he is on that day. Those things were what separated the top pros from the rest, and the good pros at all from ammies like me boarding one horse and doing most of our riding by ourselves.
I’m not sure how many young trainers today got to do all this. I am quite sure that some of them learned to make good-jumping horses from their expensive trainers. But I don’t know if they learned the horsemanship piece.
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I, too, was lucky to learn from great trainers and understand exactly what you are saying.
I was invited out by a master who put me on one of her personal horses, a super nice imported Cassini son. Right after I got on and settled she appeared from nowhere and jabbed a big ol’ syringe of Ace in his neck. Memorable day!
Actually the context of this thread was the local shows, so I’m not sure why you brought up the very small subset of the A circuit that goes on the road 40 weeks out of the year.
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I just don’t think kids/people have time to do this kind of learning anymore.
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I read the question as “do people ace horses” but the discussion has moved to “should people ace horses”. Yes, some people in every discipline at every level use whatever they think they can get away with to improve their chances. Even some of your heroes. Always have, always will. Endurance, eventing, gaited horses, western sports, racing. When buying a show hunter, their current prep cocktail is essential information. Horses are big business. Happy clients are good for the bottom line. Just a statement, not an endorsement.
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Kids have the same amount of time they’ve always had. If they’re choosing to spend it watching YouTube videos rather than riding their horse and learning horsemanship hands-on, that’s on them.
There may be more adult amateurs trying to juggle full-time work with riding these days than in the past, but time is still what you make of it and plenty of people that do put the sweat equity into becoming better riders do it on top of a full time job.
The problem isn’t a lack of time, but that people think they should be showing practically as soon as they start riding … and not even showing at little backyard shows with the local yokels, but going to WEC etc with their trainer. And many trainers are more than happy to feed these beliefs, although in some ways it’s hard to blame them, because otherwise many clients will take their money elsewhere.
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I absolutely love your post. I agree so much. I don’t jump very high anymore, and most of my “jumping” is cantering “pole courses” or dinky-jump courses. It amazes me how much my horses quiet down once they understand how easy their jobs are.
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Hey, lots of things mentioned here, you don’t want to read it, no problem, but we’re all free to write what we like as long as its not offensive, or at least that’s what I think!
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I don’t think it’s that easy. Most kids don’t necessarily get a lot of choices about where they go and how long they get to spend there. And it’s much more likely these days to be raised by a single parent or for both parents to work full time and there to be limited options for ferrying kids around. Smaller kids still require carseats (my nephew is 9 and still needs a booster seat) which makes carpooling hard.
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That is a good point that probably affects at least some kids. Plus these days it’s seen as a lot less acceptable to leave school-aged kids without direct adult supervision at all times than it was a couple decades ago … I’m not that old, but when I was kid, I was just dropped off to at the barn to ride, and the trainer was always “around” but definitely not directly supervising us kids at all times! And my parents were probably more protective than average for that time period (mid-90s)… still I honestly preferred that little bit of independence to having a parent hovering over me at all times.
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Well, it’s also that many trainers find it more profitable and easier to take an entire barn to the same show, and to focus on higher-level clients who show frequently, so they prefer to go to rated shows, and try to fill every division, from mini stirrup to the medal classes. Lots of areas don’t even have many local shows left.
I also have to say that when I was at a show barn (which I left), just leasing a horse, I felt pressured to show before I was ready/felt financially comfortable to do so. I don’t think it’s nefarious on the perspective of the trainer, truthfully, it’s just necessary for the business’s bottom line.
Sometimes it’s definitely the client wanting blue ribbons to post on their social media, but I can also see someone feeling pressured to show, having poor results, and the trainer wanting to “fix that” so the person continues showing and has a good experience. But “fixing” isn’t training.
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They really don’t.
I closed up shop in 2005 (so well before social media had taken hold) because I didn’t want to go “full grooming” and kids simply did not spend enough time at the barn to handle full-blown show horse care.
I biked to the barn as a kid, and that barn is now a subdivision. In fact, both the barns I rode at in the 90s are now subdivisions.
So now parents are commuting at least 20 minutes each way (and should consider themselves lucky if they have a barn that close). And they’re juggling this with the activity schedules of their other children (usually on the other side of town). And, if that commute is 30+ minutes each way, it doesn’t make sense to leave & come back. So now overscheduled parent is stuck sitting at the barn through the kid’s lesson and, trust me when I say, there’s nothing like a grumpy parent waiting in a car to make a kid do the absolute bare minimum and put that horse away as fast as humanly possible.
Plus “well-rounded” became the name of the game for college acceptance at some point. So you can’t just pour your heart into horses, you’ve also got play a team sport, give back to the community, take charge in youth group, run the school paper, make first chair etc etc etc.
And, well, barns just aren’t set up to babysit kids all day anymore. There’s no North 40 to explore and no large schoolie string to help take care of. Today’s suburban barns are landscaped agricultural oases. Days are meticulously planned to make good use of what little land they have. Giant pastures where herds of schoolies lived out 24/7 were sold off or cut up into paddocks. Boarding & training privately-owned horses became the bread & butter. There’s just nothing for a horseless barn rat to do all day at the barn, and it’s not the pro’s job to come up with endless activity lists for them.
The world has changed, and it did not consider the good 'ol horsey days of yore when it did. This is not to say Bring on the Drugs!; only to point out that we can’t look to the traditions of the past and demand they be reinstated. In many cases they’re just no longer possible. And if the bar for hobbyist (ie: local) horseback riding becomes 20+ hours a week at the barn and a gym membership we’re going to have a real hard time keeping this thing alive.
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If there’s an adult amateur who legit can’t find time, I promise you, there’s a kid with a parent who can’t find time, either. And if the adult in charge has no time, the kid doesn’t get to go to the barn, so they de facto also don’t have time to hang out and watch everything.
I grew up the daughter of a single working mother. There was no reason I should have been able to ride, much like the middle-class kid of today. The only reason I got to do any of this or spend so much time at the barn was Other Adults who let me tag along. That’s more rare today. Oh, and until I could drive (and could use a car other than my mom when she wasn’t using it), I could take a train out to where I could ride, but there was another (wealthier, non-working) adult to pick me up there and bring me back. My day job was to get into a fabulous college so that I would be self-supporting as an adult. I did get into a Brand Name University, but I worked very hard and slept very little to get that done. That said, those guys admitted about 14% of its applicants then (as did the Ivies on the other coast). When I taught at one way later, the admission rate was around 6%. And I’ll bet that’s 2-3% of applicants today.
To be frank, and despite my being a whiner, I think it actually has gotten harder since the glory days of late Depeche Mode and the Thompson Twins and Annie Lennox. Every man, woman and child today seems to have a job. And BOs don’t seem quite so tolerant of barn rats like me. What I see many folks here describe as “babysitting” for some kid willing to clean stalls for a ride at the end of the day, the BOs in my day saw as free labor.
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Do the Safesport rules allow the average barn owner to be tolerant of kids hanging around with no extra adults to supervise?
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Neither safesport nor liability insurance nor labor laws really encourage this.
And barns have paid adult staff to clean stalls. You can’t rely on a revolving door of teenagers for this with a barnful of privately boarded horses.
Truthfully (and possibly to the dismay of some?) my sun-up to sun-down barn rat days didn’t involve a lot of stall cleaning. We helped lesson kids tack & untack. Ran summer camps. Pulled, clipped & bathed the schoolies. Did tune-up rides on naughty ponies. Painted jumps. Got horses for the farrier & vet (then watched!). Galloped bareback across the north 40. Trail rode off property. Went swimming in the creek (because horse wouldn’t cross to get to the other side for our “picnics in the pasture”). But even back then the barn wasn’t relying on us to get the daily chores done because that’s what the mature, reliable & trained barn staff was for. And most of that other stuff??? Not even an option anymore.
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Ok, fair, it’s much harder to live the barn rat lifestyle now than it was in the 20th century. And some kids have parents with really busy schedules and nobody else in their life that can possibly give them rides to the barn.
But even for those kids who aren’t in that situation and aren’t doing 100 different things to build their college application, it seems common to rarely ride outside of lessons these days, and very common to never ride outside the ring … not even in a pasture. And a lot of that blame should probably go to the trainers and horse industry as a whole, not just the kids themselves for seeing that as an appropriate approach … how many, say, piano teachers would be ok with their students never practicing between lessons? And yet nowadays it’s almost seen as a “safety issue” for a kid or amateur to school their own horse without direct supervision of the trainer. It’s no wonder the wheels fall off when they get to the horse shows.
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A few points:
While showing a horse on ace is a total not starter for me, I have had, over the course of the years, a few young horses that we did all the right things with at home, but they dropped their cookies when they got to the show grounds. One in particular went from being confident but opinionated at home, to scared and belligerent at his first show. We left him at the show, scratched all of his classes, gave him .5cc ace the first day and handwalked him around. That stopped him from rearing, spinning, threatening to jump out of the rented paddock, and striking out (NONE of which he did at home) and made him safer to work around. We were then to progress to hacking around, then jumping ticketed warm ups and being drug free by Friday (horse got to the show on Monday ) He was then able to have a good experience the 2nd week, and got ribbons, drug free.
Re, calming supplements, Most don’t work that great. However, the products that have an ingredient for the gut, like equicalm, are life changing for everyone. The calm down the nervous stomach, resulting in a happier horse. ALL of ours get uclergard, on a tapering dose when they show
Barn rats. I was one. But running a barn, even a boarding barn that doesn’t show, is ungodly expensive, and the liability of having non-employees working around other peoples horses is just not worth it. We much prefer to have a few good professionals around, whether grooms, riders, or trainers. It’s just safer and smarter, imo
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I don’t know.
And also, I spent a certain amount of time getting chased around the dining room table by the dad of the family that I lived with in summers and weekends to be their barn rat. That is not a price I wanted to pay, of course. But it is what was charged since I didn’t come from a family that had any money to put into this passion of mine, save a set of 10 riding lessons every year for my birthday. I had to figure out a way to ingratiate myself to other people.
It’s a very different world now. But I’m pretty confident that wouldn’t be able to rig up riding opportunities now. Even lots of what I had came from luck and enough “cultural capital” in my family to know people who had horses and a barn to clean.
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