How to make everyone at the barn love you as much as you love horses
Few are the fortunate who have enough time and money to keep their own horses on their own property. Most of us work hard enough to maintain our giant pooping lawnmowers that we don't have time or money for the facilities to keep them ourselves. So we pay others to do it.
Yes. We know we are crazy. We are in a program.
Most boarding facilities have a string of clients, all different kinds of owners from little pony clubbers to young and single professionals, to soccer moms, to retirees. Bring all those different types of people together, and you are sure to have conflict.
Especially with such an opinionated and stubborn bunch as are horse-crazy females.
Most people say they hate barn drama, and try to avoid it at all costs. But I say, get ahead of the shit storm before it shits all over you. Steer into the skid, piss into the wind.
Don't know how to become the most hated, drama-causing boarder? That's why I'm here! As someone who has been at all types of barns, allow me to share some tips that I have gleaned over the years:
1. You are so lucky to be able to afford an equestrian lifestyle. Make sure everyone sees how nice your things are, and inform them how much all of it (including the activities) costs. They are dying to know, anyway.
2. Give advice to everyone whose horse does something differently than you think it should. Whether the owner rides differently, feeds differently, takes care of it differently, and ESPECIALLY when they train differently. Give advice generously and often, whether you are asked for it or not. They surely would have asked you anyway, they are just too embarrassed at how stupid they look compared to you.
3. Don't bother paying your board on time. Everyone else surely paid theirs on time, it won't matter if your payment is a few days late.
4. Better yet, try to avoid paying board altogether, and "work it off with barn chores." Then do a shitty job on those chores. Management is getting free labor, they should be grateful!
5. Don't pay attention to routine things like farriery, shots, worming. Then at the last minute, text the barn manager and ask to get on the list first thing in the day. After all, since you forgot, you have a thing planned that day and you need to get there on time.
6. Start group chats with certain people in the barn. That's the way to have a safe space for inside jokes that you can bring up later in the presence of others.
7. Make sure you have just a couple of friends at the barn with whom you can trash talk the others. You just have to get some things off your chest! Better than causing drama by confronting others directly to solve problems. No one wants that.
8. Call attention to yourself constantly. Be loud and distracting when others are riding, take big, lazy loops around the arena when you are warming up or cooling down. Better yet if you can take this warmup and cooldown time riding side by side with friends! The others will move out of your way.
9. Leave your horse's shit everywhere - literal shit and all your other shit too. You pay enough in board, what else will the barn staff do all day? Later, if you can't find your own brush/crop/polo wraps/first-aid kit, you can just borrow from others.
10. Don't turn out your horse enough, don't give it enough enrichment, ride it poorly, and overfeed it so that the poor thing is miserable and acts out in dangerous ways. Make sure you are never around to see this behavior, so the barn staff and other boarders have to deal with it instead of you.
11. If you have to change barns for any reason, do it in the most dramatic way possible. Make sure everyone and their third cousin knows about it, especially as you go to shows, clinics, and search for a new barn. The more reputations you tarnish, the better. The horse world is not small and reputations are bulletproof, it's not like anything you say can come back and bite you in the ass.
And there you have it. All the best ways to be smack dab in the middle of the ugliest barn drama. Just remember, no ego is too big for the Newtonian physics that is karma: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. No matter how highly you think of yourself, if you act like a piece of shit, sooner or later your life will get real shitty.
Comments
Post a Comment