And what's the most unreasonable rule at a livery yard?

At one place poos had to be picked up immediately, even if you were in a middle of a schooling session etc.

Liveries were to drag the indoor footing themselves on a rotating schedule, with ordinary rakes - and the duties were scheduled by the YO without noticing any of the liveries at all, differently each time. You could get yelled at for not raking the footing, even if you were never informed when you were to do it!

The indoor was open only up to 7PM at working days. Given that most of the liveries had a normal working regimen and could arrive at the yard only by 6PM, you could get almost no actual riding during the week.

Although horses were to get ad-lib hay, they actually stood without it quite often and liveries were banned from touching any of the hay available freely in the shed, massive amounts of it.

Jeez, no wonder I left the yard quite fast! All the rules were enforced with change of management. I now suspect that it was done on purpose, to drive most of the liveries that were there at the time - just a bunch of happy hackers and unaffiliated jumpers. Right after many left, all the vacancies were immediately filled by YM's friends.
 
If your horse pooped on the yard you had to pick it up (standard) and WASH the floor afterwards. Lovely yard, lovely owners but i did think this was a bit OCD : )
 
I'm sure there was a similar thread recently and one person said pink wheelbarrows were banned from her yard!

Reading these makes me grateful for being on a normal yard. We don't really have rules, we're just treated like adults and we all behave like them. My boy has a habit of turning his stable light on - nearly every night. At first YO asked me a few times to make sure I was turning it off (and the first 3 or 4 times I couldn't be 100% certain I had!) then we worked out it was him. Short of moving the switch or putting up a grill (switch is just outside stable door) there's not much we can do about that so I installed an ultra low-energy bulb and we've never said any more about it in 11 years. I bet a lot of YOs would complain about it, but mine never has.
 
fatpiggy said:
Actually, that was a standing rule on one yard I was on and no-one saw it as a problem. Anyone selling was using the YO's facilities to show off their horse to would-be buyers and the YO would charge a percentage of the final price. We had one livery who turned out (amongst other things) to be a small-scale dealer and he didn't declare it when he moved on so was given his marching orders when the YO found out.
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"How much did you sell that horse for?"
"£10. Here's your £1, don't spend it all at once."
 
It wasn't a rule but old yo used to have 2 dogs that seemed to lack any form of training and would steal anything left on the yard eg couldn't leave grooming kit open outside your stable while grooming to say I was none too impressed when they got hold of my tabard and ran down the school with it between them before tearing a massive hole in it. She did nothing and didn't even offer to pay towards a new one.
Think most of the liveries hated them one did chase after them with a pitch fork after they wrecked something expensive of his.
 
case895 said:
"How much did you sell that horse for?"
"£10. Here's your £1, don't spend it all at once."
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Pmsl. :D :D

As a YO I sold plenty of horses for clients, it would never have crossed my mind to ask for a %, but I did charge my standard handling fee, not that $5-10 covered the cost of sweet talking prospective buyers, running the horse up, lunging it etc, standing around for an hour when I could have been doing something more productive etc.
 
No horses over 17hh (despite one long term livery owning a 17.3hh behemoth who ran around like a loony and was unmanageable)
Could only feed their hay (which had dock and weed through it) for fear that brought in hay would spread weeds (!)
Even if obviously sharing the arena and the lights when riding at night, each person still had to pay the full lighting fee.

On a side note, I have no issue with collecting manure immediately. Where I am now, we liveries manage it ourselves, and quite a few people leave manure on the arena and simply ride it in so it 'disappears' and they don't have to pick it up. Otherwise they ride away and simply 'forget' to clean it up. It's also not nice entering the tie ups where there's a few steaming piles because people decided to ride first before cleaning up! If everyone is neat, it's all good ;)
 
Blanket worming, even if the worm count was clear as a 'preventative'. Adding brilliantly to the resistance crisis. No poo picking ever. And it cost £24 for a £5 wormer which had to be bought from the YO.

No access to the hay/straw store between 5pm and 8.30am, which nicely eliminates everyone who works Monday to Friday for 5 days straight.
 
fatpiggy said:
On the farm where my horse saw out her retirement we were not allowed to put hay pile in the fields. The land was owned by the NT and apparently it looked very untidy. In our paddock we got away with it by tying haynets to the fence under the hedge so they couldn't be seen from the road. The other field had one big round feeder in it which meant the bully horses got it all and they shy ones stood back and got hungry.
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Been on a few yards where you are not allowed to hay in the field because it makes a mess - arghhh!
 
Full livery without exercise. 'We're shut on Mondays and Christmas Day, no visiting for any reason' Beautiful yard, great facilities. I went somewhere else.
 
MiJodsR2BlinkinTite said:
I thought about moving to a certain yard a good few years ago now; and the rule was that you HAD to use "their" farrier. End of. No way.

They had vacancies at the time, I initially wondered why..........
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I spent many happy years on a yard that had a farrier come in every week - we were not allowed to bring in any other - It was great - he was a good farrier, was there every week without fail so if your horse lost a shoe you knew it would be sorted within days. Our horses were caught up and a staff member stayed with the horses while they were shod.

We also had to use the yard vet - a good one and I never had to worry if my horse got sick while I was at work.

Now I have to organise my own farrier, be there when he comes and keep my fingers crossed he's not delayed. Luckily over the years I've learnt enough basic first aid to rarely need the vet - in fact it must be 20 years since I've had to call the vet out.
 
ycbm said:
Full livery without exercise. 'We're shut on Mondays and Christmas Day, no visiting for any reason' Beautiful yard, great facilities. I went somewhere else.
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I knew a yard like that too - it was to enforce a rest day for the horses and some peace and quiet for the yard staff.

Horses were cared for as normal.
 
At a place I was, horses had to be off the paddocks when it rained. Off the fields meant they actually had to be tied up in the hayshed because there was no stables or pens so I lasted three weeks there, having not been told about this policy before the first time it rained when my horses were there.
I had the rule enforced on me by another grazer at another place that the horses all had to be fenced off from fences bordering her horse's paddock because other horses shouldn't touch her horse, to which I questioned why should my horses lose paddock space when it's her horse she doesn't want touched, but she was not receptive to my idea that she put up her own secondary fence inside her horses paddock...
 
No washing horses feet off when they were muddy, only being allowed to turn out in tiny part of field in winter due to having had mare on restricted grazing over summer.
Rules only applied to me, though...
 
This thread is very eye opening.... I was livid last week when daily turnout was limited to 5 hrs a day in company.... not what I signed up for but not actually that bad after reading this!
 
'm a yard owner. We have very few rules, it's very relaxed, the only rules we have are safety related. But it's amazing that however relaxed and calm you try and be some people will always walk all over you.
However there is a yard and competition/training centre near here which has so many rules and signs it's terrifying, and woe betide you if you break a rule you didn't know existed because a sign hadn't yet been prepared.
One rule was that you cannot leave a horse tied up to the trailer/box. Absolutely fine, can totally go along with that. But also, you couldn't leave your horse in the box unattended, so if you wanted to go and retrieve your dressage sheet, watch, pay, have a wee or get a coffee you were quite likely to be shouted at by the owner.
As you've paid to be there there didn't seem to be the concept of keeping the customer happy! It's all about power.
But I can see both sides to most yard rules, and there are often only there because someone has seen fit to seriously p*ss off the yard owner by repeatedly doing something they've been asked not to.
 
Mooseontheloose said:
'm a yard owner. We have very few rules, it's very relaxed, the only rules we have are safety related. But it's amazing that however relaxed and calm you try and be some people will always walk all over you.
However there is a yard and competition/training centre near here which has so many rules and signs it's terrifying, and woe betide you if you break a rule you didn't know existed because a sign hadn't yet been prepared.
One rule was that you cannot leave a horse tied up to the trailer/box. Absolutely fine, can totally go along with that. But also, you couldn't leave your horse in the box unattended, so if you wanted to go and retrieve your dressage sheet, watch, pay, have a wee or get a coffee you were quite likely to be shouted at by the owner.
As you've paid to be there there didn't seem to be the concept of keeping the customer happy! It's all about power.
But I can see both sides to most yard rules, and there are often only there because someone has seen fit to seriously p*ss off the yard owner by repeatedly doing something they've been asked not to.
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The trouble is people can be so stupid. I see no problem with leaving a horse tied up in a box or trailer with the bar up while you go off briefly but there are plenty of idiots who think it is just fine to disappear for an hour or more. The picking up poo straight away rule in a school may sound harsh, but once your horse and another has trotted through the pile a few times it will be scattered to the four winds and impossible to collect but it has still contaminated the surface. You get off to shift trotting poles or pick up knocked down jumps so getting off to do the business with a pooper-scooper is hardly onerous. Many of the rules posted here really are ridiculous but no doubt the YO has done it because they are fed up with idiots with zero common sense or idea of how to live in polite society. I mean, we all think that dog filth on the pavement is disgusting don't we, but there are plenty of dog-owners who won't take responsibility and then scream blue murder when slapped with a fine or a ban from taking the animal in the local park.
 
I <3 <3 <3 <3 my yard and my yard owner more and more every time I read one of these threads. All of the "rules" we have make sense and are about safety and consideration for others
 
Having to catch in everyone else's horse when you went to catch your own in, i.e. first one there brought the lot in. This wasn't a 'don't leave a horse out by itself' situation, it was a 'There are 15 horses in the field, you have to catch them all once you've fetched yours in' situation.
I then moved to a yard where the first one down in the morning fed all the others horses as well (including hay nets), which I did quite like until I noticed that 9 times out of 10, it was only me that was the first one down and it took ages to feed all 25. This meant I had to get up even earlier for work.
On both yards, these rules were made known after I had moved on to them.
Final one - Horses that wee a lot are not allowed on the front yard(new stables at the front) as this will make the yard look untidy and spoil the new stables?!? . I am not entirely sure how the YM/YO monitored the average wee output of each horse as I didn't stay long enough to find out....
 
fatpiggy said:
The picking up poo straight away rule in a school may sound harsh, but once your horse and another has trotted through the pile a few times it will be scattered to the four winds and impossible to collect but it has still contaminated the surface. You get off to shift trotting poles or pick up knocked down jumps so getting off to do the business with a pooper-scooper is hardly onerous.
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You say that but depending on your set up it is quite disruptive. Dismount leave the school, get skip tools which are just outside the fence, go back in, pick up poo, go back out to put tools away, mount via mounting block which is outside the school and has been at all the yards I have been at, go back into school and carry on. Repeat if required.


But then I'm on a quiet yard and usually have the school to myself so I work around the poo so it doesn't get trod in.
 
Was on a yard once where all horses had to have headcollars left on in the field. So I bought a leather headcollar for my horse to break it twice in the first few weeks. I hate webbing head collars, they are dangerous and to leave them on in a field is downright stupidity as far as I am concerned.

YO also used to tie my horse up with the chifney attached to his lead rope still.
 
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