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I
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met a nice, shiny-new horsewoman the other day
when she came to my farm to pick up something I was “freecycling”. We talked for a bit about what we were each
doing with our farms, and she made the comment that she had quickly gotten
tired of the boarding business when the first horse person dropped off the
first horse at her barn and not one board payment ensued. There’s a legal process here for dealing with
that situation, and it doesn’t benefit the barn owner in any way. She said something to the effect that these
people (and the folks who made the legal process of dealing with them so
onerous) didn’t get what it takes to take care of a horse.
That
got me thinking. There are, I’m
positing, five levels of horse involvement.
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| Horse riders, Horse lovers, Horse owners, and folks who just like to tailgate |
1. The
Horse Lover
Horse
lovers are wonderful people who may or may not have ever actually touched,
smelled, or been run over or dragged by an equine of any description. They love horses mostly from a distance. They love horse-centered movies, horse-themed
décor, horse farms dotting the landscape, books featuring horses, but have
probably never had the full-immersion Equi-sperience.
These people are a danger mostly to themselves. They’re the ones who will be likely to donate
to spurious charities and write letters to Congress. We need them for their letter-writing skills
and because they buy our books and our art, we just need to aim them properly.
2. The
Rider
This
includes adults who loved pony rides as kids, people taking lessons on lesson
horses, and those who used to ride but don’t anymore because something happened
to end the fantasy…like contact with Real Life.
If you get on a horse astride, aside, or abaft (I’m borrowing that
nautical term to refer to riding behind a horse in a carriage or sled, or
covering ground at the end of a rope after an ill-fated “ground driving”
effort—those folks need love too), you’re an official Horse Rider, as it tends
to be called on insurance forms. We need
you because without you and your dreams, the rest of us would have nothing to
do all day.
3. The Owner
Anyone
who has now or ever paid for or adopted an equid of any kind can join this
group. Even if you share a horse with
three other people, you’re welcome. It’s the owners who pay the freight for the
rest of the clan, so we definitely need them.
Not all owners are created equal, however. The one who dropped the horse at my new friend’s
barn and never came back is a Bad Owner.
The ones who get their horses shod and vaccinated and make sure they’re
in safe environments and pay their bills are Good Owners. It’s a spectrum.
4. The
Caretaker
If
you own a farm, have horses in the backyard, or work somewhere mucking stalls,
this is your group. These are the
least-understood, most-maligned of horse people. The first three groups may think they know about horses, but until
you’ve been up all night keeping watch over a barn roof during a blizzard, you
don’t know about horses. You don’t
really know about bedding, feed, hay, or brands of stall fans until you’ve run
up a tab buying them and tossing them out.
And you don’t know what it means to dump your horse at “the barn” while
you go on vacation until you’ve had a sleepless night or two listening to odd
noises that could be predators in the pasture or thieves in the night coming
for the dumpees. These are the true Foot
Soldiers of the business. We are
necessary, and we are to be commended.
Without us, your horses would be living in your garage and everything
you own would smell like horse, which sounds lovely in small, controlled
whiffs, but not as a full-time affair.
5. Miscellaneous Horse Professionals and Artistes
If
you do anything else with horses from brokering them, to shipping them, to slaughtering them, to
shoeing them, to giving lessons and training them, to
disposing of carcasses, to looking up their noses with your cute little
flashlights and sticking needles in them, this is where you belong. You are the moons that control the tides of the horse business. Sometimes you’re the rocky shoal against
which we crash. But you are ultimately
important to the horse world. Keep that in mind, know we appreciate you, and be careful how you roll. You have the power to sink us.
So,
who are you? And how much do you know about the other
horse people in the other groups? And
are you willing to learn?
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