Contacting trainers about working with/for them over the summer?

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Jinx94

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As I ultimately want to be breaking and schooling horses, I'm looking to gain as much experience as possible in this area. As I'll have an approximately three month summer this seemed like an ideal time for a placement.

When I spoke to my mum about this she said that she'd prefer me to possibly have a live in position with someone relatively well known rather than going along to a couple of local people..

Does anyone have any recommendations for who to contact? Unfortunately my skills aren't as good as they may require, but I'm always willing to learn and ask questions if I'm not 100% sure about something.
 
I hate to put a dampener on your obvious enthusiasm, but I think you would be far better off spending the summer developing your own riding skills, rather than trying to work with breakers/horses that need schooling. Your previous posts indicate that you're just not ready yet. Before you can even think about breaking and schooling young horses, you need to be competently riding and improving the way of going of older, more established horses. There's an old saying "Green on green equals black and blue" - and its very true. You need to not only stay on anything an older horse can throw at you, but be able to take action to prevent it doing whatever its doing, and put it back in its box, before you should go anywhere near a breaker.
As I said, I commend your enthusiasm, but think you'd be far better off riding older horses, learning from them and everyone around you, and gradually developing firm foundations, than going and trying your hand at babies, when you don't yet have the experience to educate them.
 
Jinx94 said:
Thank you! I already have opportunities to ride a number of horses over the summer, so I'll stick with that until I'm more experienced. I'll also be riding as much as possible whilst I'm at uni.

Thanks again!
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Good for you for being gracious about the advice, which probably wasn't what you wanted to hear.
 
I wish there were a like button for this thread:)

So nice to see such sensible advice offered and taken, although it's not really what the OP wanted to hear, in such good spirit.
 
I'd rather follow good advice now than bite off more than I can chew and get hurt! Auslander, I really appreciate that you gave me well explained advice - must admit, I was expecting someone to come along and say "don't be stupid, you wouldn't cope!". It also helps my parents to understand why it would be a bad idea at this point in time.
 
Back when I left school I worked on a riding school which had a small competition/livery yard. In-valuable learning curve for me working with both people, horses of different types and getting some BHS qualifications behind me. I was also lucky to have the opportunity to work for a well known British rider for a short time- again another big learning curve which I will never forget. After that I did another stint on a riding school as well, as doing some private work.
I think the types of yards I worked out in the beginning helped a lot to build the "foundations" of working with horses.

I know do something completely different job wise, as I wanted to keep horses as my hobby.
 
Jinx94 said:
I'd rather follow good advice now than bite off more than I can chew and get hurt! Auslander, I really appreciate that you gave me well explained advice - must admit, I was expecting someone to come along and say "don't be stupid, you wouldn't cope!". It also helps my parents to understand why it would be a bad idea at this point in time.
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Great attitude. You're not a million miles from me, so if you want to a bit of practice handling/riding horses that aren't your average riding school types, you'd be very welcome to come over. Mine are safe, but they're retired competition horses, so have their little quirks!
 
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