Barn drama – we all hate it, but just can’t seem to shake it.
We asked our readers to submit the wildest barn drama stories they have experienced and boy, they did not disappoint. Read on, if you dare…
Winter Barn Chores From Hell
I had the wonderful opportunity to rent a farmhouse at an empty boarding facility and in exchange for my board, I did barn chores for the six horses on the property. This way, the barn owner didn’t have to drive up twice a day. The barn owner eventually found a trainer to lease the facility and offered my services of chores in trade for board. Obviously with more horses it was more work, and not really as much in my favor anymore, but it didn’t quite tip the scales of time vs. money for me. Plus I really enjoyed getting to see all the horses tucked away properly and the barn swept clean just right.
It made me happy and I continued my trade.
Until winter came, when the weather was bad and the horses with stalls stayed in overnight. The evening chore staff didn’t get paid to clean stalls, just to feed and turn in. So when I went down the next morning, I had 24 hours worth of manure in 18 stalls!
A few weeks later the manure spreader froze solid and I was told I would ‘just’ have to haul everything to the manure pile with the wheel barrow! Not long after that the automatic waterers for the paddocks started freezing (it was a rough winter) and I was told I would ‘just’ have to haul water to the paddocks, including buckets of hot water from the barn for the ones that were icing over but hadn’t frozen solid yet (so pretty much all of them). Suddenly the chores that used to take me two hours in the morning were now running until 2 p.m.
I don’t know what I was thinking. And all this without ever saying any kind of thanks, or any acknowledgement that I was going far beyond my initial agreement. I gave my 30-days notice and said I would be paying full board thank-you-very-much. My boyfriend valiantly stepped in to help me finish out the month and we barely managed to get through it. It was rough and I have never enjoyed full board so much as I do now. Lesson learned!
Sometimes your sanity is worth a little barn drama. I probably shouldn’t have stuck with that quite so long, but on the upside we got through it, bought a house, moved my pony to an amazing new barn and are getting married in the fall.
And that trainer posts a new “help wanted” ad on her Facebook about once a month.
Thanks For The … Er… Advice
I used to event pretty often (just at the Novice level). I was living in San Diego at the time and it’s pretty common practice to apply stable wraps after cross-country because the ground is so hard there.
Anyway, the wraps that I had were just shot and the velcro sucked from being used all the time. So as a precaution, I’d wrap duct tape around the velcro so my horse couldn’t get the wrap off while, you know, being a horse.
After watching me do this, one of the nosy, wanna-be trainer types came up to me and said “you shouldn’t put duct tape on your wraps. He won’t be able to get them off.”
I blinked at her. Then very calmly said: “That’s sort of the point.”
The Kleptomaniac Boarder
I used to board at a small private barn. Everything was great until one day, a new boarder came in. She was nice at first and her horse was cute. Then things randomly started to go missing.
Most items were conveniently found in this girl’s tack locker or trailer. They were usually small things – whips, spare halters, etc. Nobody realized their stuff was gone till they needed it.
Then one day, my Charles Owen helmet went missing.
This girl DENIED it. I mean, she put on this Broadway show that her “new” helmet was not mine. My initials were on the helmet. And the helmet cover she had was also customized to my name.
She ended up returning my helmet and left the barn because “people kept accusing her of theft!”
Last I heard, she got kicked out of two more barns due to stealing.
Where The Horse Stands In Divorce
I worked with one trainer for years. She is a regular at one of the big horse show series (think Ocala or HITS) around here. We got pretty close, so close that she and her boyfriend came to my house for Christmas dinner. About 10 months later my life is upside down and I’m going through a divorce. I was trying to figure out my finances and I asked my trainer how much my horse would sell for and she gives me the same number I bought it for.
Sounds fair to me.
Fast forward a few months, and I am in a mediation for my divorce, dividing property. You know – he gets the TV and I get the fine china kind of thing. It is better for me if a piece of property I want is worth less, and for him, vice versa. The mediator comes in and says my ex is willing to let me keep the horse, but the value is twice what I had in mind, a difference in thousands of dollars. He also says that my ex got that number from my trainer, who would be willing to testify as to the amount.
So I pull out a screenshot of that prior text conversation I had with my trainer, stating the horse is worth half what he’s trying to argue now. Apparently my trainer had told my ex in preparation for the mediation to try to get that higher amount. She told him she would be willing to go on the record with that lie. And I had anticipated she would do something shady like that, so I made sure to text her the day after the divorce was filed asking how much the horse was worth, screenshot the conversation, saved the photo for months, and brought it to mediation.
Needless to say, I kept the horse. And it was given the value that I had wanted.
Barn Love Affair Gone Wrong
I once boarded at a facility where the barn manager’s boyfriend was cheating on her with a boarder. They got caught and the boyfriend got kicked out of the apartment they were living in that was attached to the barn.
The only issue was the boyfriend literally ran the farm, operated all the heavy machinery and did all of the hard work. So he was exiled to a camper out by the pastures.
He left after a short while, but then the barn fell into disarray. The barn manager left in the middle of the night after not being able to make rent and there was no one to care for the horses.
The boarders pitched in to take over immediate care, but then called the boyfriend to come back and move in to take care of the farm again.