Be careful

Those two words my man says every time I leave the house to go to the barn. Be careful. I always assure him that I am and the other night I got a phone call that helped me reassure him in this respect.

About 2 weeks ago one of the ladies at the barn got a new horse. An older palomino mare that's put together pretty decent and the mare seems to have a good brain. At least when she's given half a chance. Last weekend her new owner decided to get on her horse. She saddled her up in the barn aisle and decided to get on her there. That's where all common sense left the building.

There were two women involved in this clusterfuck. One the mare owner A and the other another boarder B. To give everyone an idea of a little back story, B is the one who doesn't do anything with her own horse and was the subject of my recent post on SIS- As If.... B is rather new to horses and doesn't know a whole lot. A has had horses and knows enough about them Not to have done what she did.

From what I was told by one of the other boarders, A was on her horse and B asked if she could get on too. At least A decided to get off the horse and let B sit on her alone. But things went horribly wrong from there. Rather than take the horse outside, A pulls a plastic lawn chair over beside the horse so B can get on.

To kind of set the stage, there are large wooden feed boxes in the aisle way. Down by her stall, there are also an assortment of folding chairs, a few muck buckets and rakes, along with a few large totes full of odds and ends. The aisle is quite cluttered and looks trashy a/f. There are also steel beams that go across the aisle as supports for the walls and roof. Not a safe place to be riding at all.

So B climbs up on the chair and proceeds to mount the horse. As her rear end graces the seat of the saddle, the chair falls over, the back of the chair touching the horse on her belly as it falls underneath her, all causing the mare to lose her shit. A admitted to me she fell and was staring up at her horses belly from the ground. B was grabbing for the beams overhead and eventually came off. She narrowly missed hitting her head on the fence in front of my pony's stall, but she didn't bounce either as she landed flat on her side, hitting the ground equally with her shoulder, side and hip.

A was texting me from the barn asking for the address. She didn't tell me it was for the ambulance coming for B. However she did let me know that she had left my feed and tack room unlocked when she left to go to the hospital. She shares my space, but since she couldn't be bothered to lock it up on her way from the barn to the car, before leaving to go to the hospital to stay with B, Yeah I'm not too thrilled. That was the 2nd time in 2 days she left my tack room unlocked and left. the. property. I have spoken to the barn owner and then to her. They both know that if it happens again I'm kicking her ass OUT!

After A finally sent me a text message saying that B is going to be okay, nothing broken just a lot of bruising and going to be sore the next few days if not weeks,  I replied that I was glad to hear and asked - Did we learn anything from this?  Her answer was Probably Not followed by a bunch more nonsense.

I explained to my man that this is a prime example of exactly Why 1) I am Very super selective of whose horses I ride, 2) I'm even More selective of who I let ride MY horses and 3) I'm probably overly cautious of who I ride With. I put a lot of work and training into my horses and don't need someone else's half trained, batshit crazy horse screwing that up or injuring them or worse- me. Different people at the last barn may have thought I was a bit snobby or stuck up because I didn't go to these events with them where it was a drunken shitfest for the weekend, but I'm fine with that. I don't feel like I'm missing anything and my horses are safe sleeping in their stalls at night.