Most of us don’t pick our barns the way we’d pick them if money and time were unlimited. We pick the one with the right trainer, the one we can afford, the one that’s twenty minutes from home instead of forty-five. Turnout availability rarely makes the shortlist when you’re also weighing board rates and arena […]

Real answers to the horsemanship questions you’ve been sitting on.

Here is something nobody tells you when you’re searching for a lesson barn: there are almost no formal requirements for someone to call themselves a riding instructor in the United States. No license. No minimum hours. No federal standard. Anyone can hang a sign, charge you by the hour, and put you on a horse. […]

It was the middle of a Georgia summer afternoon when one of the boarders’ mares went down in the field. She was older, and the pasture she was in didn’t have a lot of shade where she was lying. Several of us were at the barn that day, the manager included. I happened to be […]