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4 Alternatives to Owning a Horse

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Want a horse but can’t afford it?

You’ve got some options.

girl petting horse while volunteeringRecently, I wrote an article called 10 Reasons Your Daughter Should Own a Horse, which detailed all the benefits of horse ownership for teenage girls. Now, I’ve been compelled to address the next logical step in the consideration process. There are lots of benefits to owning horses, but the first blockade to ownership is the financial investment that has to be made. Horses cost a lot of money, no matter how much of a great influence they may have on your son or daughter.

If owning a horse is simply not an option for your family, there are alternative ways for your kids to become involved with horses and get the same benefits, without having to front such a large bill. If your daughter is already in lessons and wants to be more involved with horses, consider these next “stepping stones”, that offer many of the benefits of horse ownership:

1. Volunteer

Horses are a lot of work, but that work takes skill and knowledge. Volunteering teaches girls how to do that work, either for their own horse or a job down the line. Learning how to do things like mucking stalls, clean tack properly, put on blankets, and doing turn out are all great experience. Most barns won’t turn down free help, as long as your daughter is old enough (normally 10-12 is a great age to start working).

There’s a reason volunteering is #1 on the list. It is a great stepping stone for your daughter to prove her work ethic, commitment, focus, and all of the other characteristics that a barn manager is going to enjoy having in the barn. Once she can do that, it’s always possible that your trainer may consider trading work for lessons or free riding time. Most won’t do this until she proves she’s proficient at her work, knows what to do, and is consistently reliable. A good arrangement is to have her arrive a few hours before her lesson time to volunteer, and then build up to adding another day during the week when she can work.

The key is to offer help, not to use the barn as a babysitting service (a common complaint from barn owners). A barn owner wants a young volunteer who is thorough (even if that means slower) because it means that they won’t have to re-do the work. When your daughter is done with a task, she should go to the barn owner and say, ‘what else can I do?’ or ‘how can I help next?’– those are words that a barn owner wants to hear instead of having to constantly push their young volunteer to stay on track.

The bottom line is, volunteering is the BEST way for your daughter to work her way into the barn community, and it benefits both parties. Here’s some of the benefits your daughter will take away from this work, from the list I outlined before:

  • It builds responsibility
  • It builds self-confidence
  • It offers a variety of role models of many ages
  • It keeps her physically fit and active

2. Lease a horse

Leasing is when you pay to ride outside of a lesson situation a certain number of days per week. It has a lot of the benefits of owning a horse, but is more of a temporary commitment with limited responsibility. It earns #2 on this list, because it’s a common arrangement at any lesson barn, and is easy to get started with.

It usually costs about half of whatever boarding a horse at that barn costs ($175-$400 per month). This is commonly considered the “pre-buying” step, but it’s also a great option for those families that will never buy a horse.

Leasing a lesson horse is common because it allows your daughter to practice skills that she’s already working on, with a horse who is comfortable and familiar to her. Leasing private horses is another option, common with horse owners that can’t make it to the barn enough or want to split the cost of board. If it’s a private horse, make sure that it’s calm and dependable, and well trained enough for your daughter to be comfortable riding on her own.

Here’s how it works: When she leases a horse, she will pay a monthly fee and have a few allotted time slots or days each week that she can come ride. Some leases are strict, where she’ll have to plan a time for a number of months and that is the only time the horse will be available to her. Other leases are more flexible, especially with private horses. Most leases require that some adult be at the barn while she is riding (be it you as a parent, a barn owner or trainer), and that she still participate in a minimum number of lessons per month (2-4, depending on where you lease).

Like owning a horse, leasing has many of the same benefits. Here are the primary ones:

  • It keeps her out of trouble
  • It builds responsibility
  • It builds self-confidence
  • It will help her meet new friends
  • It keeps her humble
  • It teaches her to be a creative, active teacher

Leasing is available at most barns, but it costs more than some of these other options. So let’s talk about the next alternative– what she can do to help offset some of these costs:

3. Be a working student

Once she’s volunteered and taken lessons at a barn for a while, she (and probably you too as a parent) will begin to become very involved in the barn’s community. Becoming a working student is a common situation available if your daughter has proven that she’s a hard worker and is helpful.

This is the next step up from volunteering. She will be doing the same kind of work (all those skills that she perfected while volunteering), but now she will do it in exchange for credits towards lessons or leasing. Every barn is different and will have a different monetary/credit exchange for hours worked.

If your barn is local, you can sometimes arrange to have a school bus drop her off at the barn certain days of the week, to lessen the driving time for you as a parent.

Being a working student builds a lot of responsibility for a young girl, fast. Perhaps even more than owning a horse because she’s working hard to maintain her passion. Here are some of the benefits, on top of those found in the volunteering section above:

  • It keeps her out of trouble
  • It builds self confidence
  • It will help her meet new friends
  • It keeps her fit and physically active

4. Free ride (ride outside of a lesson)

If your daughter is volunteering or is a working student, she is actively proving her value in the barn every day. Both her instructor and other horse owners in the barn will begin to take notice of that.

There are often times where a horse owner will be out of town for a week and may ask your daughter (who will now be more experienced) to ride for a bit. You can’t bank on this opportunity– it may just emerge someday. This sort of thing happens all the time, but you or your daughter can’t make it happen. Because it’s more unpredictable, it’s earned the #4 spot on this list.

Free leasing is another similar option, though it’s less common in lesson barns and is geared towards students who are much more experienced and can help train a horse. A free lease is a lease arrangement that doesn’t cost the student any money– it’s a lease where the student rides for free on set days or times. This happens in situations where the horse owner feels that the riding your daughter is providing helps them and the horse enough that they’re willing to not charge for you for access to the horse.

In conclusion…

If owning a horse is simply to expensive for your family, that’s okay. There are lots of other ways your daughter can get involved at the barn and with horses, and she’ll still reap many, if not all, of the benefits of horse ownership.

So get out there and talk your barn owner, manager or instructor about the options available to her! And if that barn won’t accommodate these ideas, perhaps others in the area might. If you need to, take a look around and talk to others in the area. You (and your daughter) won’t regret it.

 

A last note: Don’t forget about the boys! Because this blog is geared towards girls and women, this is who I talk to– but think of all of these ideas for your son as well! Your teenage sons will have every benefit that your daughters would.

Why we should talk to strangers

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Two women in a cafeAfter living in Wyoming for a couple years, I moved home to Maine for a few months to figure out my next direction. One afternoon, I went into Eddie Bauer, and wandered around the store. A young boy, about six years old, was with his mother and grandparents and looked bored almost to tears (like any typical 6 year old boy in an adult clothing store, I’d say!).

As they walked out of the store, the little boy looking relieved, I smiled at them and said sometime encouraging words to the mother. All three adults looked at me like I had three heads, didn’t say anything, and walked out of the store. I forgot, I thought to myself, we’re in the land where strangers don’t talk to each other.

I started noticing this more. I went to the gas station to get coffee and would chat to the person next to me, and they would scurry out to pay for their coffee and leave without a word. I would go to the bar, and the new bartender wouldn’t strike up a conversation. Everyone was polite– weak smiles, but no hellos. No conversation to strike up. And within a few months, as it turns out, I was one of them.

After being surrounded by the polite distance of New England, I didn’t know how to comfortably step outside of it. So I smiled, and didn’t talk to strangers any more. And the more I kept my mouth shut, the more I felt secluded from the general population. I found it was a place where people all live side by side but don’t have neighborly dinners or talk unless they’re already close friends.

I was reminded of this when I went to the bar the other night, here in small-town Montana where I now live. I was sitting at the bar telling a friend the ridiculous story of the first horse I ever rode, a 28 year old gelding, and his grouchy “old man” antics. The bartender (who I didn’t know) walked up and joined the conversation, laughing at my story. It felt natural, not like prying. Just two strangers in a community finding something to laugh about together, to relate to each other.

The next day I went to the grocery store with a friend, and we were talking to each other about the novelty of new online deposits (oh, technology!) as we were checking out. As we took our bags, the cashier smiled and asked, “Were you talking about banks? Oh, well do I have a story for you”. Sometimes, I still find it amazing how easy it is to talk with a stranger about absolutely nothing.

To me, it’s not just about what is said– it’s about a community of people finding ways to connect to each other through our everyday lives. When you live in a setting where strangers are comfortable talking to one another, it builds camaraderie, and makes you feel included and welcomed. When I talk to strangers, it reminds me that I enjoy the company of other people, no matter who they are.

As women, we are relational. We want to connect with those that we love. We want to be seen by the world around us. Make new friends, and a meet new people. And it’s the everyday strangers that may someday, in turn, become our loved ones. That’s what talking to strangers is to me– it’s a way to expand our world and build a community that is open, supportive and ever-growing.

Keep in mind, I’m not suggesting that you go crazy or be unsafe.  But within reason, we can connect with others far more than we already do.  Especially woman to woman.

My advise: expand your horizons. Next time you see a stranger, say hi, ask how their day is, and really mean it. Give a compliment. Buy a coffee. Tell a story. Eventually someone will do that for you too, and it will make you smile.

Please, don’t touch me

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Let me preface this conversation with some important information: I’ve always liked being touched. I like to be hugged, I like to have my hair braided and my back scratched. I’m just touchable, it’s how I was born.

That said, I didn’t realize how inappropriately touchy the general population of men from New England are, until I moved away. Ladies, it might surprise you, but start paying attention when you go out; you may realize that you’re getting touched a lot by strangers and you don’t even recognize it.

Let me start at the beginning. After graduating college in New Hampshire, I moved out to Wyoming…. the land of chivalrous men. I was in a totally new world. Doors were opened for me everywhere. I mean EVERYWHERE. In a bar, when a guy came up to say hello, they came to start a conversation and that’s ALL. They would introduce themselves and chat with at least a foot of distance. And in a tight space, instead of trying to squeeze by and move me in the process, they would wait patiently until there was enough room to pass without invading my person bubble. In general, these men were just pleasant people to spend time with, and I made new friends fast.

Man & woman laughing together

I didn’t make any of these observations at the time– I just took their behavior as the norm, an integral part of my new life in Wyoming. I felt respected and I let my guard down. I trusted that they weren’t just saying hi to cop a feel later, and I was right. Eventually, I also learned that these same guy friends would defend me from any man who would ever be too forward (a big no-no in their book). All in all, I made great friends, and we had a grand time together. It wasn’t until I moved back to Maine that I started to see the vast difference between each culture’s standards for “gentlemen.”

After a few months of going out on the town in my home state, I compiled a list in my head of all the things I missed about Wyoming (clearly, struggling from culture shock). Moreover, it was a list of all the things that DIDN’T happen to me out in a bar, spending time with friends. Here’s just a tid-bit from that list:

  1. A strange man did not come up to me on the dance floor and try to hump me from behind. I did not have to have an “emergency escape plan” with a nearby girlfriend, to pretend to go to the bathroom while still trying to be polite. (When I tell my guy friends out west that there are men who actually do this, they still don’t believe me.)
  2. No one came up and grabbed my best friend’s boob unexpectedly. Literally, not one stranger came and copped a feel without saying hello.
  3. No one tried to “slide by me” while grabbing my waist and moving me a foot to the side as they slid their body along my back. Thank you, but there was plenty of room for you to walk by.
  4. No one tried to touch my… (yeah, I’ll let you take a wild guess).
  5. None of my girlfriends we’re rufied by the people they took to be their friends.

Some of you may think that’s an absurd list. But unfortunately, yes, all of those things happened to me or my close friends while in New England. Those are real interactions, at respectable bars. It didn’t take me more than once of going out in Maine to realize that I didn’t want to do it any more, because I had simply gotten too used to the chivalrous alternative.

Now, I will note for anyone who’s starting to get offended, not all men from New England are like this. I know that. I know plenty of respectful, down to earth and hands-off men and they’re treasures, so I try to befriend them all. But it seems that in the 20’s age range, in certain communities, these nice guys are far outweighed by the others.

On one of my evenings out in Portland, I met an old acquaintance from high school. We caught up, and I was thoroughly impressed with his respectfulness. For over twenty minutes, he didn’t so much as lay a finger on me. Always the one to reward with praise, I told him out of the blue, “Thank you so much for being the only guy here to not touch me all evening. It’s really refreshing.”

He leaned down, clearly having not heard me, he said, “What was that?” as he put a firm grip on my waist.

“Never mind…” I said.

10 reasons your teenage daughter should own a horse

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I was one hell of a teenager: utterly independent, debated everything and sought full control over my own life by the time I was 13. Looking back, it was actually my horse that kept me safe and out of trouble, when my parents could only do so much.

There are many reasons that your teenage daughter might want a horse. There’s also many reasons that as a parent, you may think it’s a bad idea. There’s pros and cons to every situation, I know.

Cons: first off, horses are expensive– they’re actually black holes for money, let’s be realistic. This is usually the first turn off for parents. They take countless hours and coordination of chauffeuring your daughter back and forth from the barn. There’s plenty of other cons, for sure. But for argument’s sake, let’s try to put all those hesitations on hold for the next 5 minutes…. And go!

Draft Horse & Girl Photo - SmallAs an on again, off again riding instructor, I believe that for all of the challenges, there’s far more benefits, many that you may not even know about yet. A horse could mold your daughter into the person you’d be proud to see her grow into. To all of the parents who are weighing the pros and cons of horse ownership, here’s why I would argue that it’s worth every penny.

 

1. It keeps her out of trouble. Let me say this again. IT KEEPS HER OUT OF TROUBLE.

When she’s busy at the barn riding (… and grooming, and cleaning tack, and cleaning stalls and doing turnout and dumping wheelbarrows and raking the arena and so on) she has less time to get into trouble. Boredom and friends who may be a bad influence get pushed to the side line, because frankly, getting a job to pay for that new saddle is more important. This is the same with any intensive sports program. Some may argue that horses take up too much time for kids, but I disagree– as long as it’s not all work and there is some play in there, their days may be full but they’re fulfilling.

2. It costs money– which she should be at least partially responsible for.

Horses do cost a lot of money. So does their tack and vet bills. And the board bill, if you choose to board at a stable. If you’re willing to help your daughter in some financial way I’m sure it will be greatly appreciated. But in no way should any parent be expected to front all of that bill. Figure out a system to split up the costs that works for both of you. If she wants a horse, she should be expected to get a job to help pay for it. End of story. Plus, that job will help keep her out of even more trouble.

3.  It builds responsibility.

Just like any pet, this horse depends on her for exercise. It depends on her skill and patience to learn new things and uphold good manners. It depends on her time and her money to eat, to drink, and to have shelter. In essence, this horse depends on your daughter (and you, out of default) for everything. This kind of dependence builds a lot of responsibility and character in your little girl, as long as she follows through on her end of the deal to take care of them.

If you’re thinking that a dog can build the same responsibility and be a lot cheaper, you’re right and you’re wrong. Having a horse builds more responsibility than a dog. If she had to decide between going to town with her friends and taking her dog for a walk, she could potentially combine the two. With horses, she will have to separate out time to devote to it’s well-being alone. In addition, horses help her build a strong community separate from you as a parent, while a dog is an addition to your home/family life.

4.  It builds self confidence.

Everyone says this, because it’s true. Most riding is an independent sport (she does it alone, versus on a team). However, she’s not really alone… She’s in a partnership, where she is expected to be the leader. And she’ll have coaches teaching her how to lead in the most effective way. Nothing builds self confidence better than “leadership training” that she loves.

Another thought to ponder on: your daughter is going to tell this 1,000 pound animal to move one inch to the left. And then one inch to the right. And then to follow her. And when the horse does something out of line, she will be responsible for administering the proper discipline. How would you feel if you were in that situation? That’s a form of empowerment that’s only found working with large animals.

5.  It will help her meet new friends.

If she’s in a lesson program, it’s likely that she’s going to meet many friends her own age. Most horse people will attest to meeting their best, life-long friends at the barn. That’s because friends at her school will only get to know half of her life. Her horse friends will get to know all of her, including the after-school horse loving, hard-working side that the others won’t see. Best of all, these girls will have the same passion and devotion in them too. That connection creates a stronger bond just in itself.

6.  The barn offers a good variety of role models of many ages.

Having a horse boarded at a barn offers a daily interaction for your daughter with people of all ages. When you drop her off, she will have the opportunity to freely connect with other women, without feeling the pressure of mom or dad standing by. Instead of just interacting with one age group in school or in sports, your daughter will talk many women in their 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s.

If they get close enough, they’ll start to seek support from these women, which is key– they’ll normally offer the same advise you might want to as a parent, and your daughter may be more apt to listen to someone outside of the family. Better than getting advise from her friends at school? Maybe so. Many girls end up acting “more mature for their age” because of this daily influence.

7.  It keeps her humble.

Horses are going to teach her that she’s wrong all the time. She didn’t ride that move quite right, her legs slipped back and that’s why she fell off. Nobody else made her fall off but herself (and no, it’s never the horses fault). Or, her instructor is telling her (again) that her hands need to be quieter. That she’s getting there, but she hasn’t got it yet.

In every situation with horses, she will always be able to get better and she’ll never be done learning. Every rider understands this very quickly.

8.  It’ll keep her fit and physically active.

Horses, like most sports, will keep your daughter active. Riding, tacking up and untacking all are activities that require her to be moving around and outside in all kinds of weather (even if she rides in an indoor arena, you get the gist). Cleaning stalls, doing turnout, feeding– all of these barn chores actively burn calories and build muscle. Think kids are too sedentary these days? Get em’ a horse.

9.  It helps them be creative, active teachers.

Having her own horse means that for the most part she’ll be riding on her own, outside of a lesson situation. This means that she’ll have to work through a lot of the daily training challenges that come up when riding on her own. It will force her to think creatively about how she’s training her horse and how to solve a particular problem.

If something worked in the last lesson, but it’s not working now, what else can she try? How else can she solve this issue? Being in a lesson program provides necessary guidance, but when it’s not paired with independent riding, it can create a mental dependence on someone telling her exactly what to do and when to do it.

All of this active participation in learning how to ride, how to train and what to do when a challenge emerges will help her in high school, in college and in every job from there on out.

10.  It teaches her HOW her brain learns new things.

Me, I learn through metaphors. I also need to understand a big picture first before breaking it down into smaller details. I learned that through riding.

Everyone learns differently, and learning from different instructors will teach your daughter how to recognize when she understands something and when she doesn’t. When she has that “ah-ha” moment, she can break down to recognize how it was explained to her and ask for that kind of teaching in the future. She can also apply it to the other learning that she has to do in school and later in life, in her career. It’s all about self awareness.

In Conclusion…

At the end of the day, you’ll have to work as a family to decide if a horse is really the right fit. But I know from experience, horses help girls grow into empathic, engaged, and responsible young women. You make the final call.