My Google alerts have been liberally peppered lately with news items about someone not generally known for having scurf under his finger nails: Bill Gates. First it was about the $40,000 (and counting) in fines he’s racked up with an illegal manure bin at his spread in Welly World (the one he bought when he finally realized that paying more on rent for a season than most of us spend in a lifetime on a home wasn’t in keeping with his smart-nerd-philanthropist reputation). Now he’s back in the gossip pages for buying Jenny Craig’s SoCal pony palace near San Diego. Also recently dropping some millions on a California crib-with-horse-benefits lately is Lady Gaga.
There are people who might say that it’s great for the equestrian industry that the world’s rich and famous are making such a public display of embracing the horse world with their bundles of cash. But I don’t see it quite that way. Equestrian sport has never been able to shake free of a perception that it’s expensive and elitist. Well, it IS expensive. And it has also been becoming steadily more elitist, never more so than right now.
I imagine a 2014 conversation between a horse-crazy young girl and her mother going something like this:
Mommy, can I have a pony?
No dear, ponies are too expensive. How about a new iPad instead?
Well then, can I have riding lessons?
No, because that will only make you want the pony even more badly. And as I’ve just told you, ponies are expensive.
But Bill Gates’ daughter has horses, and so does Jessica Springsteen, and Kaley Cuoco of The Big Bang Theory rides all the time.
That’s exactly my point, honey. Riding is only for the very rich, like those people you mentioned. We aren’t in that league and we will never be able to afford the hobbies of such people. What day is your next soccer practice?
When I was a kid in the very, very, very backwoods of northern British Columbia, my mother built an equestrian centre from raw land, nearly with her bare hands. She quit her school teaching job and hung out a shingle as a trainer. All manner of horses passed through our barn: quarter horses (best buckers), arabs (spookiest), saddlebreds (stupidest), off-the-track Thoroughbreds (hottest, especially on left lead). I went over my first jumps on an arab-quarter horse cross (best combo of bucking and spooking) named Spooky. Yes, that really was his name. I rode a wide variety of inexpensive horses growing up, and boy did I learn to stick.
The best event horse I ever owned was a 15.1 hand dun-roan quarter horse named Snap that we found, literally, in a junk yard. There isn’t much contextual value to the fact that he cost $2,000 because it was more than 30 years ago, but let’s leave it with the observation that I achieved the best competitive results of my whole life with a horse that cost me very little.
Do people with little or no money starting out find success in the horse industry? Yes, of course they do. But less and less often, as the super-richification of equestrian sport continues unabated. In Canada we see a decline in grass-roots entry into equestrian activities, and I believe some blame must lie at the gilded door mats of the super-rich who are becoming the most public face of equestrian sport. Most of the people reading this blog probably have a non-monetarily motivated or facilitated relationship with the wonderful creatures we adore, that we call horses. But I fear we are becoming an endangered species.
