by Brandon Wright
Communities across Canada are built on the success of small businesses. This idea is no different on Manitoulin Island, about eight hours north of Toronto, Ont.
A riding stable, home to anywhere between 20 to 30 horses, has been a staple in the community since it opened 17 years ago.
I spoke to the head trail guide, Miranda MacKay, about some of the positives and negatives the Honora Bay Riding Stable community is experiencing during the COVID-19 pandemic.
How have summer plans been impacted by the ongoing pandemic?
Well, right now, we aren’t open to the public at all. We can't have any anybody come in for trail rides or lessons. So, we have no business from that. We just don't have any business at all.
What has been challenging about taking care of and feeding the horses without any money coming in?
Here, we are very, very thankful that we own our property, we don't rent from anybody. On our property, we have two very large barns that are full of hay. So, we buy our hay in the summer for the entire year, and a lot of barns have to just buy hay per month to be able to feed the horses. We're really, really thankful that we have enough hay that we don't have to worry about not being able to feed them right now. We're coming into summer so the horses will be able to go out on our grass pastures. So, food-wise, we are OK. I know some of the other barns aren't, but we're just really, really thankful that we are.
Our owner, Kyla Jansen, does all her own farrier work. She is a certified farrier. So that cuts that cost down significantly. Your average cost to feed a horse for a month would be $100 in a big setting like this and horses typically need their hooves trimmed every six weeks and that would be a $40 cost every time kind of thing. But since Kyla does her own farrier work, so we don't have to pay for that expense either right now.
You said you're continuing to do work without the pay. Does that speak to how much the horses mean to you?
Yes, exactly. It is. It’s such a passion for me. I love being able to work with the horses and seeing their training progress.
I love it so much that it's OK that I'm not being paid right now. I know that I'll have a paying summer job a little bit later in the year and since I’m not getting any money, I do qualify for the government funding right now.
I noticed that there seemed to be a lot of community support and positive responses on your Facebook for the stable and the horses. Could you tell me a little bit about that?
We decided to reach out to the community for support to help cover some of the costs of not having an income, not having the lessons. We actually received an incredible amount of donations through a program called “Sponsor a Schooley.” People can choose to sponsor one of our school horses or lesson horses, and it just helps cover the cost of feeding them and the fact that there aren't lessons.
I think Manitoulin Island is quite unique in that way, that the communities are so tight, and we all want to support each other especially in a time like this one when we don't really know what's going to be happening. A lot of businesses come together to support each other in any way they can.
The Toronto Star has written a story a few weeks ago about how some stables across the province have been hit so hard financially, that they have had to put some of their horses down. Has this been something you have had to think about at the stable?
Seeing those posts, it's heartbreaking. For a lesson barn, horses that can tolerate little kids riding on them, not knowing what they're doing, pulling them around, a horse that can tolerate somebody learning on them is, well, they are worth a million dollars. We at Honora Bay Riding Stable, we can't imagine ever having to put down one of our million-dollar ponies because we couldn't feed them. We would definitely look at selling them first, and we actually, we have had to do that.
Kyla sold her personal horse to be able to pay for the hay for this coming season. That was an extremely hard decision to make. He's been here for a couple of years and she has put a ton of time and love and effort into working with him and training him and riding him. She loved him but the money that he made for the stable by selling him, it needed to happen. It's really sad that we had to sell him, and we were looking at selling a couple of other horses that maybe don't get used as much by the stable. So, we have a few up for sale right now. It's hard to sell them but that is definitely where we would go with it. We couldn't just put them down.
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