28th August, 2015 Living with Livery

I am fortunate, very very fortunate, to be able to rent land for my horses and despite the lack of facilities, no school, no stabling, I am extremely happy where I am. I could not live with my horses at livery. I am sure that there are happy livery owners and happy horse owners at livery but all too often I find a palpable tension when I go into livery yards, a quiet stand-off between the yard owners and the horse owner or between the horse owner and other horse owners. It's not easy running a profitable business, it's not easy answering to the needs of different people, but so often horses and owners are forced into a regime that doesn't suit them, doesn't suit their horse, and compromises the horses safety and health.

Many livery yards have grown up on farm land where the farmer has been forced to diversify. The grass is dairy grass, too rich for horses, so the field size shrinks, the fences are electrified all round, and the amount of movement, shelter, interest for the horse diminishes. Often horses are kept alone, possibly next to other horses, but unable to engage in behaviour which is necessary for their soul. In one livery yard I went to recently, all the other horses in adjacent paddocks had been taken in, leaving one mare completely alone who eventually crashed her way through the electric fencing.

Management regimes insist that horses come in for prolonged periods of time, increasing the risk of gastric ulcers two fold. The stables are rarely safe from a fire safety perspective - dusty, with cobwebs and flammable materials such as hay, straw and even vehicles stored within the same buildings. Horses last less than four minutes from the beginning of a fire. In many yards they wouldn't stand a chance.

Things are unlikely to get better with farm land being sold for housing. As a result there is pressure to have more horses per acre and beggars can't be choosers.

Livery yards can also be terrible places for bullying. People offering advice they haven't been asked for and talking behind other people's backs. I know I couldn't stand it. That daily tension can feed into the emotions that you take to your horse. You have to be strong to ignore it.

Where horses are on part or full livery, owners are well aware that all of the training that they do with their horses can be undermined by inconsistency of approach whether deliberate or inadvertent.