Piece 5: Matching Horses

One summer, I decided to switch things up and work at a kids camp in Colorado as an assistant horse wrangler. I’ve been riding since I was young and love horses, so I figured it would be a perfect summer job. Turns out, I was wrong. That summer, the camp was incredibly under-staffed in all areas, and a lack of sufficient staff training resulted in dangerous situations for both kids and counselors. On the horse side of things, it wasn’t going much better. None of the full time staff had any horse knowledge besides me and the horses that were intended to be used the program were just a hair short of being absolutely wild. And for a camp that was intending to put children on these horse, this was a recipe for disaster. I managed to scrape together a program for the summer that avoided safety hazards and harm to the children.

Emerging on the other side of this experience, the problem-solving tendency in me struggled with how this could’ve been prevented and what I could do to fix it for the next person. This piece reflects how I think the major problem with the horse program in specific at this camp could be solved or at least improved upon.  Read below to see how I design an algorithm in an app to assist in matching children with the appropriate horse.

Step 1: Identify the Problem

Since this was a summer job, that meant little consistency in roles. New horse wranglers would come every summer and the most recent existing wrangler guide was full of outdated information. Additionally, the camp rented 20 horses to fill out their herd in the summers. These horses came with no information and the new wranglers had to quickly determine which horses were best for younger children. Having ridden horses for over 10 years and helped out at riding programs for five, if I know anything, it’s that you need to be sure your horses temperament is well suited for the chaos of little kids. If not, then there’s going to be a lot of problems, and with a thousand pound animal, you really don’t want to have problems. So the question is: how do I make sure what I had to go through doesn’t happen with the next wranglers? How do I pass down all the useful information on horses? Well, I thought an App might do the trick. A horse-child matching app.

Step 2: Collect all Relevant Information

So the next step is what information do I need to collect to input into this app to get a desired outcome? Well, turns out, there’s a lot.

1. Extraneous Factors

   1. Weather for the day

   2. Total number of children for program

   3. Type of ride planned

After completing these forms, the algorithm will assign the horse a number based on overall usability in the program. The children will similarly be assigned a number based on the difficulty they might pose in the program.

Step 3: Rules for Matching Horses and Children

Overall: The calmer, better beginner horses, should have low scores, while the high-strung and dangerous horses should have higher scores. Ideally, horses with too high of a score would get returned or replaced in the program. For the kids, the lower the score, the worse rider the kid is probably going to be. The higher the score, the better rider. Thus, the horses with low scores should be ideally placed with the low score children and vice a versa. We want the kids who are likely to not listen or are nervous riders to be on the bomb-proof horses that aren’t likely to do much more than follow the trail.

Step 4: The Algorithm

This is where the magical algorithm will come into play; i.e. time to hand this information over to a developer. Here is where all the above information is inputted and produces the desired outcome; a horse to child match. Ideally, each child for the program would be matched with a suitable horse(s).

Step 4(b) : Additional Features

The main part of this app would be the horse-child matching system. However, there would be some other important features that I wish I had been given. These fall under nice-to-have features category on the app.

• One subsection of this app would be a bridle-saddle-horse matching system, where all the tack would be labeled based on size and then matched to horses that they fit on. This wouldn’t have to be a one-to-one match, but rather a list of compatible horses for each saddle.

• Another subsection would be a map feature with all the trails clearly marked from start to finish with the difficulty level. I’d rather not get lost in the woods on a horse again thank you very much.

• Pictures of Horses and Children

• Finally, sort of an addition to the main matching algorithm, a cumulative, historical database of horses and children would be helpful. There would be an option to select the “herd” for the summer and save it as a subsection of all of the horses and only run the algorithm through that. This would allow information to be passed along from summer to summer as horses may come back for another summer and the information will already be there. Same with children, though both may need to be updated.

Step 5: Implementation

This would all be put into an app that could be easily accessed on cellphones as there were no laptops available by the horses. At the beginning of the summer, the wranglers would spend most of the time imputing information on the herd, figuring out which horses were usable, and which were not. The app would then build profiles for each horse with a number based on difficulty. Ideally, during this time, horses with high numbers would be returned to the rental place and replaced. Each horse will also be able to be listed as Active or Inactive depending on injuries or sores. Then, when the kids arrive, the wranglers would input all the information available about each kid for that day (or week). Then, poof, magic! The app would match the best horse to each child from the whole herd. If there are enough horses to choose from, the app would even give multiple options of horses for each kid. The wrangler can then hand pick from their own personal experience and produce a list of horses to use for each section of the program.

Last Thoughts:

As a horse person, I have spent years at barns with various different programs. And almost all of these places depend on the knowledge of a few people. The more time you spend with a program, the more you learn about specific horses, and the more valuable you become. And for established barns, this isn’t so much of an issue; generally enough people know a lot about the horses so someone is almost always around. However, in places such as this kids camp, this knowledge gap proved (I think) to be it’s greatest failing. The failure to have a well-trained herd, a stable supply of ridable horses, was exasperated by the utter lack of information being passed down. Every rental horse we had was new. Half the herd information was outdated. There weren’t even marked trails. There was nothing for us to build upon and thus the program we scraped together had too many close calls. And nearly all of this could have been avoided with some simple communication. That’s why I devised this app the way I did; yes I would like horse profiles to be saved in case they return next year, but I also wanted to pass down just the simple logic of how to match horses with kids. Having an app like this where each year the new wranglers are able to add new horse profiles, keep track of returning kids, even mark trails on a map section would make the transition between summers so much easier. Even if all the horses were new from previous summers, at least the organizational aspect would remain in place; the structure in which to build a program. And so to end, while I didn’t go through the process of creating the app and devising the algorithm, this process has strengthened my organizational and strategic skills and I can finally put that challenging summer to rest here. I solved the problem, in my head at least. And now, enjoy the horse photos (I took a lot).