Help A Horse Day 2024 is on Tuesday, March 26, 2024: Feeding a horse once a day?

Tuesday, March 26, 2024 is Help A Horse Day 2024. Celebrate ASPCA Help a Horse Day Schedule a volunteer work day

Help A Horse Day

No horsing around-- today is an opportunity for you to be a great 'neeeiiigh-bor' on Help a Horse Day!

Equines continue to be both a popular animal in addition to working as tireless farm animals. Recently, tales of their disregard and abandonment have remained to increase; as owners have discovered the cost of taking care of them as well excessive to handle.

Help a Horse Day is your chance to send out a donation to an equine care charity of your choice! Or share an apple or carrot with a neighborhood equine you understand! Or authorize your name to a request demanding better care for these faithful, four-footed friends that have offered us so over the centuries. All they need is a hand (after all, most of them are at least 10 hands higher!) to take pleasure in a much better life.

Feeding a horse once a day?

Horses are grazers, designed to eat nibbles for 18 hours a day (in the wild). Now, of course, not all horses can do this now, but keep this in mind when designing feed schedules. Is your horse fed on grass? How hard is it worked? This affects how it should be fed. But general advise is that, if your horses are doing fine on their amount of grain right now, divide that in half and give half in the morning and half at night.

Renting a horse for a day?

Renting a horse for a day?

Not a chance with the way liability laws are nowadays. To let people rent trail horses without a guide a stable owner would have to totally ignore the fact that they are opening themselves up to the risk of losing everything they own, everything they have spent their entire life working for, in a lawsuit should something go wrong. You can sign away liability all you like but the law does not recognize those releases in cases of gross negligence and the precedent has already been set-it's gross negligence to allow unguided trail rides. You also cannot sign away the liability of anyone you may encounter on a trail ride. Say the horse you or your dad is riding spooks and runs over someone else, killing them? Who is liable? Not just you or your dad for not controlling the horse but also the horse owner.

So you see, a stable owner would be very foolish and careless to allow their horses to go out without a guide. I'm sure there may be a few scattered low-end pay-the-hour places that still allow it but with the litigious society we live in they are operating on borrowed time. I also would not trust the judgement of anyone operating a business that allows that to happen. It shows very poor judgement on their part and a total lack of understanding with regards to the assumed liability.

On another note, wanting to rent horses you are totally unfamiliar with and take them out unsupervised is foolish also. How can you guarantee the horses are sound? Have no vices? Are safe for your beginner father? Rental horses have their fair share of issues. People that are in the rental business are trying to make a living and investing in good quality, well-trained stock cuts into profits.

I worked with a horse rental for quite a few years and saw more accidents with the riders than I care to remember. I even saw a young girl get killed on a trail ride. I got a crash course in liability laws during my time there and it's a pretty serious subject. There is no "just hopping on the horse and going out without a guide" for very, very good reason.

I also dealt with too many horses to remember during my time at the rental. While the horses knew their job there were very few I would have felt comfortable sending riders out on alone. The guide is there for a reason- to ensure the safety of the clients. It takes an experienced person to handle a rental string and in many ways the rentals were more difficult to maintain than many privately-owned horses I've dealt with. It's not as easy as it looks.

What Modern Day Jobs Do Horses have?

What Modern Day Jobs Do Horses have?

The primary working horse types these days I would say are as follows:

Police horses: Horses allow police officers to see over the tops of crowds easily, move through congested streets more easily than cars, provide a strong visual presence for mounted police, and also a strong physical presence as a deterrent. For the reasons police forces around the world still have mounted sections.

Army Horses: Mainly for ceremonial purposes for parades etc. Usually this is for regiments that started life as cavalry. One example is the Queens Household Cavalry in England - now the modern regiment is mechanized cavalry but the horses are still awesome to see on ceremonial occasions!

Draught horses: I live in a town where at least one pair of draught horses is employed in pulling a large cart with a water tank mounted on it. They go round the pedestrian areas watering the civic flowerbeds.

Racehorses: Goes without saying.

Riding Stables Horses: Horses employed at stables to help people who dont own their own horses to learn to ride.

There's prolly more but those are the main ones i can think of!

Jen x

Holidays also on this date Tuesday, March 26, 2024...