25/07/2025
Great information, thanks Dr Shelley 💕🙌🐴💞
Time, Guilt, and Weather Apps: A Field Guide to the Modern Horse Owner ⛈
It begins with a noble dream:You and your horse, gliding through life with grace, ease, and a perfectly colour-coordinated saddle pad.
And then reality shuffles in wearing wet socks and holding a head torch with flat batteries.
You wake up. It’s still dark. You go to work. Still dark. You get home. Still dark. You open Instagram—bright sunshine and someone schooling flying changes. You look at your own horse, who is mostly mud. And suddenly, you feel like you’ve failed an exam you didn’t know you were sitting.
🧭 The Modern Equestrian Predicament
In my community (the CWCH Society Group—aka the loveliest horse community on the internet), I asked members a simple question:
“Are you struggling to find time for your horse?”
And the responses rolled in like a landslide made of agistment contracts, work schedules, chronic fatigue, broken floats, and the eternal mystery of why the round yard is always underwater.
The answers were honest. Messy. Beautiful. Familiar.
🧱 The Core Issues
(Also known as the Crushing Weight of Adulthood)
Let’s take a tour of the collective chaos.
🕰 1. Time Poverty
Full-time work. Commuting. Parenting. Meal prep. And the daily decision: shower or sleep? Horse time is often wedged into Sunday like a forgotten side quest.
People aren’t lazy. They’re booked. With obligations. And rain. And fences that collapse in the night for reasons known only to Satan and post-and-rail timber.
☔️ 2. Seasonal Sabotage
Winter seems to have a personal vendetta against horse people.
“My round yard is a swimming pool.”
“I fed in the dark. Again.”
“It’s too wet to walk without falling over like a sack of potatoes.”
And it’s not just winter. Summer is nuclear. Autumn is windier than a politician in a live debate. Spring? Cold, windy, and hay fever from hell.
We’ve built calendars, but the seasons still win.
😩 3. Emotional Overload & Guilt
This one hit hard.
People described themselves as overwhelmed, disappointed, frustrated, and guilty. Some used words like useless or pathetic. Others described crying, burnout, even physical illness from trying to do too much—or too little.
Apparently:
If you don’t work your horse, you feel guilty.
If you do work your horse, you feel like you should’ve done more paddock maintenance.
If you manage both, you collapse and forget what joy feels like.
🧑🌾 4. Physical Limits
(a.k.a. “My Body Said No, But the Horse Said ‘Where’s My Dinner?’”)
Chronic fatigue. Autoimmune flares. Grief. Menopause. The sheer exhaustion of being alive.
The expectation that we should always bounce back is not only unkind—it’s downright delusional.
And yet we keep shaming ourselves for not doing more, even when we’re running on fumes and Nurofen.
💸 5. The Infrastructure Problem
Agistment 40 minutes away.
Sloping properties.
No flat ground.
No arena.
No time to float somewhere else.
Too much time floating somewhere else.
In short: horses are magnificent, inconvenient creatures—equal parts athlete, escape artist, mud enthusiast, and full-time dependent with hooves.
🧠 6. Comparisonitis (Chronic)
Social media, as always, makes it worse.
Even people who know their horses are happy, safe, and well cared for… still feel like they’re failing because they’re not progressing.
One ride per week? Clearly not enough.
No riding at all? Clearly not a real horse person.
Fed, rugged, and healthy? Still not good enough if someone else is cantering past a mirror with “ ” in the caption.
😶🌫️ 7. Identity Crisis in a Saddle Pad
Beneath it all is a deeper question:
What does it mean to be a good horse person… when life won’t let you be the horse person you thought you’d be?
Many responses wrestled with this quietly.
People who used to ride every day now feel guilty for brushing a mane once a week.
People building beautiful horse properties wonder if they’re “doing enough.”
Some—softly, privately—admit they don’t know if they can keep going at all.
Not because they don’t love their horses. But because the life around their horses has become too heavy to carry without help.
🪞 The Mirror
This blog doesn’t offer a solution.
It’s not a 5-step system. There’s no slogan, no gratitude journal, no “just breathe and manifest your dream paddock.”
It’s a mirror.
To show you that the overwhelm isn’t just you. It’s not weakness or failure. It’s the world we’re all moving through—together.
And somehow, there’s comfort in that.
Next Up: I’m going to invite you to take part in a practical experiment. To see if, as a community, we can figure out what to do with all of this.
It’s called the Ladder of Yes. And I’ll write about it tomorrow.
But first— Finish your tea, take a deep breath, and remind yourself:
You’re not alone. You’re just busy, tired, and doing your bloody best.
P.S. If this hit home, hit the share button. Please don’t copy and paste the whole thing—hitting “share” will save you time (and your thumb joints).
IMAGE📸: Max arriving at a clinic on a very chilly winters day in Perth, WA ❤
