05/15/2026
This is a good read!
I officially retired my mare, Eclipse, from riding at 7 years old because she has arthritis in her knee. She is uncomfortable undersaddle.
Can I medicate her and give her injections so she can keep going? Sure! However, that is only a bandaid. She is happy and sound as a pasture puff so that is just the way it will be!
No one wants a horse they can’t ride.
This simple fact promotes a lot of harm within the horse world.
Saddle fitters feel pressured to fit saddles to underdeveloped and atrophied top lines because owners don’t want to hear that the saddle cannot be fit and that the horse should not be ridden until they have more back muscle.
People feel entitled to riding — they don’t want to have to be “sidelined” on the ground, especially if there are other professionals who will give them the answer that they are looking for, the one that tells them they can continue on riding without issue.
Trainers experience something similar.
Client horses who are not completely physically sound, or are mentally struggling, owned by clients who don’t want to hear that they need to slow things down and not ride or take things way slower under saddle.
Humans are creatures that often seek instant gratification, and when this involves another animal like a horse, that desire to seek out the more fun destination often comes at the expense of the Horse.
It also pressures professionals to take shortcuts and enable things that they know deep down are not the best for the horse.
This is so insidious in our industry.
It is the pressure behind a lot of bad decisions that end up permanently damaging horses or dooming horses to lives where they are forced to work through pain.
Riding should not be viewed as a right.
It should be seen as a privilege.
And, when owning a horse, it should be seen as a given that that doesn’t mean that you are perpetually entitled to riding them.
It means that part of your duty as their caretaker and advocate may involve not always having your desire to ride come first.
It may involve taking breaks as needed for the betterment of their physical and mental well-being.
This should be the standard, but it isn’t.
It is so incredibly common to see people putting off their permanently lame horses onto other people because they are not willing to pay for them when they are not rideable.
This is so normalized that people will even say that they don’t want to pay for a horse that they cannot ride.
And while I understand, that horses are expensive, we can’t really skirt around the fact that, for far too many people, horses lose all value to them when they are not rideable.
People no longer want to keep their horse safe or pay to care for them if they cannot sit on their back.
This fact inevitably results in a lot of unwanted horses.
And there simply are not enough homes that want to take on the unrideable horse.
This is an uncomfortable conversation that needs to be had.
How many professionals can think back to a situation where they felt pressured to keep a horse in work when they knew it wasn’t the best option?
How many of them bit their tongue and didn’t tell the owners what they wanted to say because they knew it wouldn’t be listened to?
How many of us have had to sacrifice our morals at some point in order to get a paycheque to pay the bills?
I know that I have. It was necessary to do so in order to further my career, because no one wants to be told not to ride, especially when they are paying you to solve their problems.
But, sometimes it is necessary to forgo riding to solve the root of the problem.
Yet, very few people are open to hearing that.
Has anyone else experienced this?
