text: If you work on a Thoroughbred farm, you're going to start at the bottom-- general maintenance and cleanup, i.e., stall-mucking.  Much of the work you'll start out doing will be hard manual labor that doesn't involve hands-on work with the horses.  The work is tough and the pay isn't good.  Also, there may not be any health benefits-- which you may not care about until you desperately need them.\n\nOver time, you'll get to work with the horses more.  While horses are wonderful animals to be around, they are also large animals that can behave unpredictably, and anyone who makes their living handling horses knows that it isn't a question of whether they will ever get hurt by a horse, it's a question of when and how bad. \n\nThis is not to try to discourage you from working with horses, but you have to understand realistically that working with horses can be hard and painful.  It can involve days that begin before the sun is up, when the temperature is below freezing, that don't end until hours after dark.  It can mean being dirty and hot and tired.\n\nAnd the truth is that it just doesn't pay very well.  I have a friend who worked for 15 years at a Standardbred training center.  She broke green two-year-olds, trained racehorses, went to the track with the racehorses, and had her assistant trainer's credential.  After fifteen years of this, she was living in a run-down trailer that didn't have electricity, plumbing or gas, she had no health benefits, no savings, her car was 17 years old and had 190,000 miles on it.\n\nWhen she got an eye infection and ended up having to use the left-over ointment from her dog's eye infection to treat it because she didn't have money for a doctor, she decided that she'd had enough and quit the job.  She works as a pari-mutuel clerk now and has a "day job" as well.\n\nShe doesn't regret the years she spent working with the horses, but memories are all she came away with after 15 years.