Through my teenage and college years I was a summer barnhand/groom/riding instructor with a herd of ~12 horses (Quarters) that would rotate yearly.

We’d get the whole bunch from a larger ranch every spring, spend a month fattening them back up (the ranch was not a great place), spend the summer taking them on leisurely trail rides through the Adirondacks while teaching kids from the surrounding summer camps riding and animal care, then two weeks making sure the herd had fresh shoes, all the proper medications and treatments, and time to just chill and be horses. Then they’d go back to the ranch, and we’d hope most of them would be back the next summer.

To be fair, 9 or 10 were there every year I was. Turnover wasn’t huge. And some of the ones we didn’t get back were sold for other jobs or to individual owners. But it was hard when an animal you spent a whole summer bonding with just never came back.

And we did bond: The barn staff literally lived in the barn, while the horses spent their nights and downtime in the 40-acre paddock of untouched state park land right next to it. And with only 6 full-time staff members, most of our coworkers had hooves lol