[QUOTE=CDE Driver;2971520]
On the days I wish I didn’t live waaaay out in the boonies I will come back and read this thread! Folks have to be pretty lost to find their way here. LOL[/QUOTE]
but you have to spray paint HORSE or COW on the both sides of the animals to keep the city hunters from shooting the guys for a dear.
Deer? :winkgrin:
I had to make a sign to place on the fence that borders the rural road we live on. For my goats! Well-meaning (albeit iggnit) neighbors were laboring under the false impression that “Goats can eat everything! Tin Cans! Garbage! They’re indestructible!” Um, no they can’t/aren’t. My precious little pygmies are fed a sensible and wholesome diet. There are garden-variety plants (pardon the pun) that can kill a goat that eats them. The politely worded sign points out that these are "“Show goats” and on a very special diet. Thank you for not giving us hand-outs." So far I haven’t seen anymore children feeding candy bars to them.
Now I need to personalize my mouthy mini-mare’s blanket. It should read “I am a fat, fat, FAT Pony. I am on a strict diet. I like carrots, apples and fingers. I already had my carrots and apples…”:winkgrin:
I would be upset if there were people wandering around in my pastures. It is not safe, and I do not want to be responsible for injuries. That said, I think that this is the perfect opportunity to educate my neighbors (and have done so) and build alliances. This is my first choice of action (besides padlocked gates) since I live in an area that is rapidly changing from horsie to not-horsie. Keeping others safe while keeping the horses safe is my first priority, but I think I can achieve this and also provide education and interest in the horses rather than alienating the neighbors by being that “unrational horse-person.” I haven’t resorted to signs but would do so in the name of safety before I would yell at people or threaten them.
I learn best if people explain to me the reasons why they feel the way they do so that I can apply this knowledge to future situations. I think most others learn best this way too. I do not want to discourage people from this wonderful sport that we are all a part of through my own rude behavior. Enough people don’t like our dirty, stinky horses as it is…I don’t want to encourage anyone else to think this way. This has payed off for me personally, in terms of considerate neighbors who look out for me and my horses as well as allowed me to put in a good word for horses to an appreciative audience.
Guess I am of a totally different mind than most. When we first moved here, it was a big deal to stop and look at the “big white horse” which was my Percheron Smoke. Our much loved neighbor down the road was feeding the horses carrots and that is how I met her, she was holding an empty bag and I walked down our drive to introduce myself. I admit, it took me a moment to speak when she admitted she had fed them a 10lb bag so I showed her how to break them up in more manageable pieces and feed them.
Neighbor across the street is a nut, hates horses. The first year we were here he took great delight in spooking them with his 4 wheelers, going after me or coming at me when I drove or rode. That winter my big Percheron came in with an absess and when my vet lanced it, imagine my surprise when we pulled a pellet out of her cheek bone. :no: His kids, ranging in age of 7 to 12 were caught sneaking across the street feeding my horses God knows what, trying to slip through the boards and I have a gelding who HATES kids. I put up do not feed the horses signs, a VA state equestrian liability and enter at your own risk sign in plain view on my fence then went one step further and invited the kids over to help me feed and took that opportunity to educate and drill in WHY we don’t sneak into our pasture. Showing a draft hoof that is a size 6 shoe impresses kids and brings home the possibility that it can take their head easily. It really did help them to be better and they ask now when they want to see the horses, so I will bring out my QH mare Lucy who loves kids and enjoys the attention.
I have caught people petting and feeding grass to my horses often enough. Does it worry me? Course it does, I would hate to see someone get hurt or bitten. But, instead of getting angry or being labeled a “nasty snotty horse owner”, I go out, introduce myself, then introduce my horses and their little habits or idiosyncrosies. My horses are very friendly, they are curious and they will walk right up to the fence to see who the person is standing at the fence. I don’t want to discourage them being friendly so I would rather educate than be rude.
But, that is just me. Life is too short to yell at someone unless they are honestly being totally stupid or putting themselves and your horse in harms way, be it out of ignorance, stupidity, or just not knowing any better.
Call me what ever you want but I STILL will pet strange horses that walk up to the fence. Around here most fences go to the property line. So if I am on the other side of the fence I am not trespassing! lol! As long as people stay on the OTHER side of my fence I don’t care if they pet my horses. SURE, they might bite, but so what? There are a LOT of things that could happen. One of my trees could fall over and crush a car going down the road, doesn’t make me want to cut them all down. I would be delighted to see someone stopping to pet my horses! Go nuts! I will even come out and talk to you about them. One time I saw a car stopping to take pictures of my horses and I was just beaming with pride! Someone actually took time out of their day to take pictures of my babies!! YAY!
Just a few months ago I was seeing a guy and he told me his neighbor was selling 5 horses for around $200-$300 each. The guy wasn’t home but I didn’t think anything of crawling through the fence to see if they were mares or geldings or what. If the horses had of ‘attacked’ me ( I was watching body language so I knew they wouldn’t) I sure as heck would NOT have sued. Geez…my choice to crawl through the fence. Although I wouldn’t have if the place had of been perfect looking and the horses expensive looking. If that makes sense. I could just tell from the barbed wire laying around and the broken down corrals that this guy wouldn’t care if I crawled through to take a look at them…and besides he WAS selling them.
Incase you are wondering, I never did buy the horses. I dumped that guy later that day and never called him back to get the owners number.
Slithly - like I said, I’m casual. That would be the day my horses dared chase for a treat!! I was a horse lover, horse petter and can understand kids wanting to pet. Nobody ever got into my paddocks or over the electric fence (they got a few zaps, though!) but I was definitely put out to see the neighbours swimming in our pool once when we had been out for the afternoon! I have actually found most people to be super friendly and neighbourly. To find a kid in a stallion’s stall would have spooked me though!!
Okay, me and the SO are guilty of this when we were kids… Back in the day when we both were teenagers, we went down to this one pasture about 3/4 of a mile from where we lived… At said pasture were 3 horses who we thought were great… although thier living conditions (the pasture they were in) sucked… Muddy, swampy, a general mess…
After many midnight excursions down there we got the brilliant idea that it was in the horses best interest to move them out of said swampy pasture… So off we go one moonlit summer night… build a rather large bridge over a ditch and move the horses over this ditch all without waking the rather large junkyard type barn dog…we actually accomplished the task without injury to ourselves, the horses and without managing to wake up the dog or get shot by the farm owner. And since the horses new pasture was way in the back of a 100 acre spread we then proceeded to spend at least one night a week down there working these horses in the middle of the night of course… We never did hear anything from the owner of the property about any of this since we dismantled the bridge we used…
Was this in any way smart? NOT AT ALL… But we figured since we never got caught and no one ever tried to move the horses back to that pasture all was good… It just seemed like a great adventure at the time (we were 16 and 19 in those days so this was a good 25 years ago). Of course there was no excuse for it and it was really wrong but we were just being dumb kids at the time…
And scarier still when you see them digging around the car looking for something to “feed” the pretty horses. Yikes.
ESG, an elementary school and 300 new homes are going in a 1/2 mile from me and I can see the writing on the wall. Call me a fascist, but I believe we who are already here should have some ability to determine what happens to our local area. All the zoning meetings were changed and rescheduled with practically no notice to foil the locals.
If I move further out into the country, won’t I be part of the problem?
If I found someone in my horse’s stall I would call the police and get them arrested. Isn’t that breaking and entering?
[QUOTE=riverbell93;2971908]
Maybe it’s because I’m in NJ, where horses (and open space) are rare and exotic like tigers, but there is a real ugliness to the “They’re MINE and these people are TRESPASSING!” tone of some posts. It reminds me of the people who scowl at anyone who admires their baby, as if they’re entitled to a bubble of total privacy even when they’re in public. If you stick a horse in a field by the side of a public road, you made the horse visible to the public. Some people, not knowing any better, will heed their children’s pleas to stop and pet it. If that bothers you, or if you have a horse with food allergies or aggression, don’t put him in a pasture beside a public road. You can’t control other people; all you can do is call the police on the bad ones, educate the good ones, and not expect the rest of the world to worry about your insurance or your happiness.[/QUOTE]
Yeah, you are from NJ, because it is usuall in rural areas to respect someone else’s livestock.
I recently had a road put in right along my pasture…people stop to look, and will at times ask me if they can pet or feed a treat. I take a minute to chat with them and let them know about the horses they are looking at. It has gotten me some lesson business. I have had to warn a few people about the kids putting hands in etc, but I do it in a nice way.
I don’t want to be remembered as the crazy horse lady down the street:lol:
hey hey I’m from jersey!!! We’re mostly nice in my area (central though…it really does depend on where you are from) lol and i live in semi rural horse area. And yes i will be a cranky pain in the ass if people are trespassing. I don’t mind if they come and talk to me first. But don’t just show up and start hand feeding whomever you want.
B/c if you have a pool in your backyard…well that means i can come over and go swimming whenever right? without asking?
It’s just rude and inconsiderate.
I have educated my neighbors, but they don’t always pay attention. My neighbor in the back has just gotten an off the track tb gelding (ha he “could ride he’d been on a horse 10 times…” ) ugh. and was walking his gelding RIGHT next to my back paddock riling up the horses there. I don’t know you. I don’t know your horse. I don’t know if he has had shots or anything. My horses are striking out at the fence and are attempting to get hung up b/c you thinks its funny. Yea he got yelled at (nicely) for that.
BUT i did help him get his horse on a correct diet being that the tb was underweight and he was told the incorrect type of feed by the trainer (who like the "starve his horses b/c they ran better…uh what?).
So you get all kinds. Thankfully my township is very horse oriented where if your neighbor doesn’t have horses, the person across the street does (the NJ horse park is right down the road…so…)
But it does irritate me when people just show up (few and far between but it does happen) and do whatever without asking. If you want to pet the horses, come up to the house and ask us. I have no prob with showing you around and have you meet everyone (i will prob then talk to you for hours…so you might not want to haha) so i can keep an eye on everything. Mr 18h drafty who lives in the front is VERY mouthy and we are trying to stop that…
I think it’s common sense but then again not everyone thinks the same way. : )
The problem with saying “but I’d never sue!” is that maybe you wouldn’t but your insurance company will.
I had a student get her foot stepped on while grooming. Totally her fault, she said as much when she told me. She wasn’t worried, her parents undestood that stuff happens and they weren’t upset, but they did take her for xrays when it was still sore a day or two later. Just covering their bases, and no the foot wasn’t broken, just a deep bruise.
About 3 weeks later the BO gets a nastygram from the parents’ Ins Co saying pay this or we’ll sue, you were at fault blah blah blah. BO called the parents about it and they were horrified. They placed no blame on the BO or me, but of course the Xray bill was submitted to insurance.
It all worked out with a return letter from BO’s lawyer, but if this much stink was raised from a $600 bill and a minor injury, can you imagine the mayhem from a serious and $$$ injury? This was in PA in the 80s, and at that point they did NOT have an Equine Liability Law on the books. And though the law is a good thing, it won’t stop a lawsuit from being put in motion.
Here is an Idea
Put signs saying horses bite (whether they do or not) on the pasture fences and barn doors.
As for Unsupporvised children(only if repeatedly). I would call the police and let child and family services take care of it.
I know I am mean, but I have no patience for such things
[QUOTE=xeroxchick;2976192]
Yeah, you are from NJ, because it is usuall in rural areas to respect someone else’s livestock.[/QUOTE]
And it was once usual in all areas of the country to respect other people. Being decent to other people is more important than being respectful of property. My point in the earlier post is that people seem to forget that when they have dependents; the baby whose parents resent a stranger’s smile, the dog walker who is angry that someone tries to pet their dog, the horse owner who resents people stopping by the fence. It’s the duty of anyone with a dependent to protect and care for them; that doesn’t mean you get a free pass to be ugly toward others, or to think of the world in terms of threats to you and yours. If you have a situation where the dependent is threatened by otherwise innocent actions (a fearful dog, a biting horse, etc.) you deal with it. You don’t pretend that the whole rest of the world is on notice to understand your special needs.
Memory lane
When I was a kid, back in the days before so much litigation and when kids actually roamed a lot, a friend and I were hiking not too far from home when we came across two horses in a field. We tried to pet them and the chestnut came to the fence but not the “white” horse. We came back when next we could but brought carrots. Both horses enjoyed our visit. Some months later my folks agreed to let me get a horse (I was 13). I called ads in the paper and found one that sound good. Low and behold it was the two horses we had fed a few months earlier. I ended up buying the gray. :lol:
Now, I have a kid down the street that is interested in horses. There are horses all up and down the road but I’m the only one that’s friendly with them. I have asked them not to feed the horses when I’m not around and not to feed my youngster at all. They have been respectful of that. If I"m around and she’s wearing proper footwear, I’ll take her into the pasture with me. Most of the time though she shows up in roller skates and knows she can’t go into the pasture in them. I figure if she were as obsessive as I was at that age, she’d show up in the correct shoes. I would do anything to be around a horse as a kid, including cleaning others tack. I find that some of the kids who come around just want to give treat or ride but don’t necessarily want to learn to groom, etc.
[QUOTE=Iron Horse Farm;2969378]
Thank God for 4 strand hotwire![/QUOTE]
Ha! I can appreciate this one! About 3 months ago I was out in our barn cleaning stalls and hadn’t noticed that a car had stopped on the street and a father and son were actually IN OUR DRIVEWAY trying to get to one of my geldings out front. The hotwire is on the inside of the fence, and I guess the son reached up to climb onto the fence and got SERIOUSLY zapped. I heard the crying, and ran out of the barn, and the dad had the nerve to give me a lecture on how his son just got zapped by our “dangerous” fence, and “he was only trying to pet the horsey”. I was flabbergasted! My response, “Can you read?” Dad looks at me, and I point to the NUMEROUS signs on our fence that say “hotwire” and “please leave the horses alone”. Dad is still not going to give up, and at this point my husband had looked out the window and seen the strangers and came flying out of the house (he is a little over protective…he’s in law enforcement). Hubby asks why they are on our property, and the Dad gives my husband the sob story of his son getting zapped. My husband also asks if he can read, and informs the guy that we don’t run a petting zoo, and that he is trespassing. They finally leave.
This all happened before we had our rod iron gate installed to keep people like this out (and our horses in if they decided to take a tour outside of their pastures…) I still can’t believe it! Some people!
[QUOTE=Holly Jeanne;2976928]
Now, I have a kid down the street that is interested in horses. There are horses all up and down the road but I’m the only one that’s friendly with them. I have asked them not to feed the horses when I’m not around and not to feed my youngster at all. They have been respectful of that. [/QUOTE]
I remember being horse-crazy with no horse of my own - so when we moved out here and the neighborhood kids came over to see the horses, I haltered one, led him up to the fence and let them pet him. I then explained about the hot wire and why climbing the fence would be a BAD idea. I’ve let one of them come help me feed before (horses were in stalls, she dumped grain into bucket without going in stall) and let people pet noses.
I don’t want anyone on our property or with our horses when I’m not here/without my permission. I’ve made that clear politely. 
And it seems that they’re all respecting that and I’m glad to be able to share a little horse-ness with them.
Love it! :lol: That’s exactly what I am talking about–the ignorant rude people who want to blame you the second they get hurt from their own stupidity. Imagine if only they had gotten close enough to a horse to get kicked in the head–that’s WAY worse than being zapped by the fence & the dad would have most likely been sueing you ASAP (or his insurance company would). :rolleyes:
Cripes–I broke my own hand riding & my insurance sent me a form asking who else could possibly be even remotely responsible so they could go after them. I am sure if anybody got hurt by my horses that person would have no problem telling their insurance company where to find me.
[QUOTE=Giddy-up;2977157]
Love it! :lol: That’s exactly what I am talking about–the ignorant rude people who want to blame you the second they get hurt from their own stupidity. Imagine if only they had gotten close enough to a horse to get kicked in the head–that’s WAY worse than being zapped by the fence & the dad would have most likely been sueing you ASAP (or his insurance company would). :rolleyes:
Cripes–I broke my own hand riding & my insurance sent me a form asking who else could possibly be even remotely responsible so they could go after them. I am sure if anybody got hurt by my horses that person would have no problem telling their insurance company where to find me.[/QUOTE]
yeah, seriously! My husband also told the guy that the horse he was trying to pet “will rip your kids arm right off” (totally not true, he is possibly one of the kindest horses I have…but that comment did get them to leave!)
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