No livery, full livery or part livery: how to choose?

You've just taken up riding. You're full of energy and you want to spend it with a horse you've recently bought. So now you have a choice to make between no livery, full livery and part livery. To make a sensible decision, you need to look at the following points.

Your budget

The first thing that limits your choice of livery for your horse is your budget. It tells you how much you have in your account that can go towards your ambition of riding every day. If the budget is tight, you can't afford full livery. And if things are going really badly, even with part livery you'll have to give up the privilege of being the only one to ride your horse, or at least of deciding who else can ride him. Budget is therefore a real constraint. It sometimes pushes people towards keeping the horse themselves with no livery at all, which on the face of it isn't in the horse's best interests.

Time

Between work, daily life, family and horses, it's often extremely hard to find time for everything. This is what pushes many people towards part livery. They know the horse can't be left standing around waiting for them to turn up. In that case it's better to settle for riding him a few hours a week. To do that, they deduct the cost of the other hours in the week they spend away from the horse, which is covered by someone else. They then become co-users of the horse for their riding.

Distance

Whether the yard is near your home or not has a bearing on the type of livery you choose. If you pay for full livery for a horse kept hundreds of kilometres from home, that's a heavy financial loss for benefits you can't easily enjoy. Better to do without and go for part livery. Ideally, if you're not in a built-up area, you can look after your horse yourself with no livery at all. Even so, for his morale, the odd spell at a yard wouldn't go amiss.

The quality of the service

To choose full livery, you have to have confidence in the quality of the yard's service. That way you can be sure your horse will be treated with all the care he deserves, in line with what you're paying. To satisfy yourself on this, inspect the facilities on site. They should be of good quality and meet the usual standards. Beyond that, the cleanliness of the place and its day-to-day upkeep should be what convinces you to leave your horse there on full or part livery. And if, on top of that, you can check the quality of the work done by the staff on a daily basis, you'll be proud to leave your horse in the yard's expert hands.