15/08/2025
Just a post to explain how our sanctuary and riding lessons work (all of this information is also available to everyone on our website: www.shylowen.com)
To be clear, Shy Lowen is a horse and pony rescue charity, and this has always and will always be our priority. We are not a riding school, and we are certainly not a profitable business, we only offer a few lessons 4 days per week, and in fact the extremely low price of our lessons barely covers our costs for the licensing, staffing and insurance required to provide them. We do this to give opportunities to people who otherwise may never get the chance to ride or be around horses. However, as a small charity with limited time available and a limited amount of licensed horses that the public can legally ride, we can't possibly provide lessons for every person who asks for them, and frankly, our lessons are not suited to every person who asks for them.
We do not offer traditional riding lessons, our aim is to teach people interested in 'horse whispering' and animal welfare to learn to use respectful communication, energy and ethical training, methods and equipment to ride horses. We do not allow whips, spurs or kicking in our lessons or anywhere on our premises and as we have explained before, we will never allow any of our horses to be disrespected, insulted, or referred to as 'it'. This is non-negotiable, and we will not compromise our stance on these issues for anybody, regardless of previous experience or ability.
At the moment we are being constantly inundated with enquiries about lessons via phonecalls, emails and messages and people calling in on spec. We are a small charity with limited funds who don't have dedicated office or admin staff - all visitors, calls, emails, social media etc are dealt with by our small team of trustees and staff, in between the extremely busy work of looking after the 43 rescue horses currently in our care as well as retraining and rehoming them, and providing all of our services to the community, local schools, mental health therapies, training courses, lessons, and all of the paperwork, funding bids, reports, etc, etc, etc.
Calls and messages often continue into the evening and even late at night or early hours of the morning, and we do our best to answer them all promptly, despite the sanctuary always being closed by 6pm. We all already work over and above full-time hours just to keep the place running, and as we are sure you can appreciate, it is very tiring and stressful keeping on top of all this without having to also work more extra hours in our own time, especially when the information being requested is often already freely available online.
We decided last year that given the level of demand, the fairest way to prioritise who gets lessons was to offer them first to the people who already support the sanctuary's horses or work in some way, either by volunteering, attending open days and events, promoting the sanctuary, fundraising, sponsoring horses, or in numerous other ways. Again, this is also explained clearly on our website.
Despite this, we are getting an increasing amount of people accusing us of being nasty or rude for having to refuse them lessons because they don't meet these criteria, or for only offering brief answers to messages outside of our opening hours, and even being abusive to our staff when we can't offer them what they want despite them being willing to pay. Many have even offered donations purely as a way of getting what they want, and become abusive when we explain that this is not how it works, as we are more concerned that people care about our horses and learning about what we do than in gaining financial contributions.
We have also had children turn up for lessons and own a pony days with whips, and situations have become fractious when we won't allow them to bring them in.There are plenty of riding school businesses and trekking centres out there who can provide for people who are only interested in riding and want to simply pay for traditional riding lessons, but that is not what we are about.
To reiterate, we are completely transparent in all of our aims and ethics, and all of this information is available 24/7 on our website. We encourage anyone interested in Shy Lowen or the services we provide, to take some responsibility and do their research on our organisation and its rules and objectives before contacting us personally. This way, you can make an educated decision on whether it's the right place for you, and our hardworking staff won't be needlessly insulted and abused for simply explaining how our charity works and enforcing our ethics. They may also get a bit more time to themselves outside of working hours! 😴
Thank you for your understanding and continued support ❤️
We hope to see you at our Open Day this Sunday 17th August!
Our charity aims to relieve the suffering of animals (in particular equines) in need of care and attention and to provide and maintain rescue homes or other facilities for the reception, care and treatment of such animals. We educate the public in matters pertaining to animal welfare in general and....
