What would you do? Dog vs. Polos

Lets say you were riding one evening and un-tacked your horse in the cross tie area leaving your polos on the ground next to your horse and walked away to go chat on your phone. You come back 5 minutes later and one of the barn dogs took off with a polo. You go fetch the polo and notice a hole.. still usable but non the less, a hole. What are your feelings on this?

Should the barn owner re-imburse you for the full cost (or fair market value) of the polos? Should you not say anything and just remember to put my stuff up next time?

I think you are responsible for your own equipment. I am trying to drum this into my 16yo's head!!

I can see it both ways....

The farm dog should know enough not to touch anything in the barn, so that falls on the owner.

However, if dogs are running around the property, you should know enough to put your stuff up as the potential is there for it to leave via the dog.


If they were my polos, and just ones that I used every day, I probably wouldn't care. Possibly even if they were "good" polos...I still wouldn't be that upset about it. If I had caught the dog "stealing" I would have aimed a (missing it) kick at him, and yelled at it.....but I wouldn't feel like the BO should reimburse me for them.

The dog isn't the best barn dog in the world but isn't bad either. She doesn't go into the pastures and chase horses but will bark if they start pawing the fence or act naughty in some way that gets her attention. She doesn't normally chew on stuff but she's learned there are lots of goodies around horses aka poop and hoof trimmings. If you yell at her she usually stops.

The polos are regular purple fleece polos that are at least a year old. She is insisting that I reimburse her..... She consistently leaves stuff out including bags of fast food that she has left at the barn 10 ft from the trash can (and any dog would get into) that I've had to clean up.

Just for fun, I should also add that her horse is a stall chewer and likes to scrape her teeth up and down the stall bars and has scraped all the paint off...

If said boarder's horse broke a stall door or something major, would he/she have to pay? (I only use this example because I watched it happen the other night, ugh...it got fixed but the question was still raised in my head)

So for a $20 set of polos, maybe she should consider letting it go if she saw the bigger picture...

LOL...I didn't read your last post before I submitted mine...

So tell her you'll trade - a new stall door for a set of polos? *muahaha...*

I would be happy that while I was away chatting on my phone paying no attention to my horse in cross ties that nothing bad happened to my horse and I would write off the polos as my own stupidity.

Also well said... hahaha...

A dog is a dog, if you are going to leave stuff on the floor you can't get mad if the dog gets into it !!

I wouldn't expect reimbursement. It's barn, it's full of animals and things are bound to happen. My kid left her apple unattended on my tack box and the barn pony ate it. Same pony walked up to me and bit the zipper pull off my jacket one day.

If you leave your stuff lying around, you have to expect that something will happen to it. It would be completely different if the items were properly stored but they weren't.