When You Can’t Have Your Own Horse: Sometimes Life Isn’t Fair for a Reason

As an instructor, I see young students from different economic levels. Many come from families who struggle and make sacrifices to pay for lessons while others are comfortable enough to buy several horses. When one of my students voiced her frustrations that her parents couldn’t afford a horse but her friend was getting a beautiful expensive warmblood, I immediately remembered back to when I was a junior rider still on lesson horses while my friend had two horses.

“It’s not fair,” my student muttered. She desperately wanted her own horse.

“Life isn’t fair,” I answered. “It just isn’t, and that’s way it goes. Once you accept that fact, you can move on instead of complaining about it.”

I told her that though I grew up riding, my family was never rich. My dad was a police officer and my mom a nurse. I worked in riding camp, cleaned my own stalls and took money for schooling horses.

Then we talked about other options to not having a horse like finding free leases, shared leases, half boards, schooling sale horses or even getting paid to exercise privately owned horses. It’s possible to find because I found them even as a young adult before I could afford my own horse.

I told her that now is the time to ride every horse you can, to learn as much as you can and to decide what types of horses you really like. Now is the time to learn how to school different types of horses, to take advantage of not being strapped down to one horse. Now she can look forward to having fun on the college equestrian teams where you can’t use your own horse anyway. So when the day comes when she can afford a horse, she’ll have the requisite knowledge, experience and understanding for buying and owning her own horse.

Having your own horse is a great thing, but it can also be restricting in many ways. A rider who has access to all different types of horses keeps her skills fresh, but a rider who continually rides the same horse or the same type of horse loses her skills and her timing quickly. I see that in my students, and I see it in myself.

Life may not be fair, and some people may have to work extra hard to get what they really want. But it makes it so much more rewarding when it all works out in the end.
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