07/10/2026
I’ve had quite a few conversations recently since advertising some of our ponies for loan/lease, and it’s made me think about how much expectations seem to have changed.
This genuinely isn’t aimed at anyone in particular, and it’s certainly not meant to offend anyone, but years ago if someone didn’t want to, or simply couldn’t, pay the price for an established pony or horse they would often look for a genuine project instead.
They would take something that needed time, consistency and work, and put that work in themselves.
That’s how I learned as a child. I had some interesting ponies, to put it mildly 😂
Some of the best ponies we have now are ponies that nobody would have wanted to sit on when they first arrived. They were worried, made mistakes and, yes, even threw people off. If you had seen some of the ponies our regular riders now have as favourites when we first got them, you probably wouldn’t have wanted to sit on them either.
But they needed time, patience, understanding and consistency.
What I’m finding much more now is that people often want the finished article — the pony that has had six months, a year, sometimes two years of work put into it. The one that has been ridden by different riders, seen different environments, been taken out, produced carefully and become as safe, sensible and tried-and-tested as any pony realistically can be.
But they want that pony for the price of the project.
And sometimes there seems to be very little willingness to compromise and actually take the project pony that needs the work.
The reality is, that work is exactly what creates the pony everyone then wants.
We take the green, inexperienced or slightly rough-around-the-edges pony or horse. We put in the hours, the schooling, the outings, the different riders, the confidence-building, the mistakes, the setbacks and the consistency. Eventually that pony becomes the lovely established type that people are searching for.
That time and experience has value.
Of course, no pony is ever truly “bombproof” — they are animals, not machines — but getting one to the stage where it is reliable, adaptable and proven takes a huge amount of time and work.
There absolutely are lovely affordable ponies out there, but sometimes affordability means being willing to compromise somewhere — age, experience, schooling, mileage or the amount of work still to be done.
Because ultimately, you have two choices: pay for the work that has already been done, or take on the project and put that work in yourself.
The finished pony didn’t magically become the finished pony.
Someone invested the time. Someone took the risks. Someone rode through the difficult days, built the confidence, gave it the mileage and did the boring, repetitive work nobody sees.
That is what you are paying for.
You’re not just paying for the pony standing in front of you today — you’re paying for everything that went into making that pony the one everybody now wants.
You can have the project price, or you can have the finished product.
But you can’t realistically expect the finished product at the project price.
A picture of deli as she is just so beautiful ❤️
* who we bought as a project unseen from a field and we took to 2 National finals at Stoneleigh.
