Adventures in Horse Shopping, part 1

I was feeling pretty proud of myself.  I'd seen the listing on Facebook about a half hour after it posted.  I contacted the seller immediately, and got her first available appointment to see the horse.  For the first time, I finally felt like I was on top of the process and that I had a good chance of being able to buy a horse for Gemma.  The horse was a cutie and looked like a great fit for Gemma.

Three hours later, I got a message from the seller that the horse had sold.  Someone had been willing to commit to buying the horse sight unseen.  I have some feelings about that particular part of the horse buying process.  I really believe it is unethical to sell a horse to someone who is willing to buy the horse without first coming to try it out.  I know that different people have different philosophies about horses and buying and selling them.  And while I do spend a lot of time trying to see things from different perspectives, this is one area where I simply can't.

To me, horses are sentient beings, and if you are selling one, it behooves you to spend at least some time ensuring that the horse is going to a home that is appropriate and that the rider/handler will be a good fit for the horse.  In fact, in today's market, there is no excuse for doing anything else.  With buyers coming out of the woodwork and willing to pay top dollar, sellers can easily be choosy and still sell the horse for a reasonable price quickly.  

And yet, that isn't what they are doing.  They seem to be selling to the first person who has the money.  How these transactions are even happening is beyond me.  Are sellers really getting messages from random strangers committing to pay thousands and thousands of dollars for the horse they are advertising for sale?  And are buyers really sending thousands and thousands of dollars to random strangers to buy a horse based on pictures and a video?  The whole idea makes me so uncomfortable, my brain has trouble processing it.  I simply can't imagine buying a horse for my child without seeing the horse in person and learning some key pieces of information.

I suspect that in at least some cases the buyers of these horses are flippers, who intend to resell the horse in the near future, or summer camps, or lesson programs.  And I guess in those situations, there is less need to be certain the horse is a great fit.  But it bothers me that sellers are willing to sell to anyone, even when they have a person already set to come to an appointment.  And I came to the realization that I am absolutely not cut out for buying a horse, especially in such a competitive market.

After getting the message from that seller, I had had enough.  I unfollowed all the groups on FB that were posting sales ads.  I stopped doing searches every day on websites that listed horses.  I told a friend that had been spending a lot of time helping me find listings that I was taking a break.  And I stopped looking.  I wasn't sure how to tell Gemma yet, but I knew I could not continue to drive myself crazy and endure the constant highs and lows of finding a horse that looked like a great possibility, only to find out that the horse sold within an hour of being listed (I'm not exaggerating, that happened).

And I took a few days to get my head back together and remember what my life looked like before I started horse shopping.  After a few days of a mental break, I realized I did still have one option left.  An auction.  At least at an auction, I could look at the horses in person.  I could talk to the seller.  And I would be equal to the other buyers.  If I found a horse I liked, I wouldn't have to worry that someone would swoop in and buy the horse before I had a chance to bid.  I still might not get the horse, if someone was willing to pay more, but I would have the opportunity.  And that sounded a lot more attractive to what I had been doing.

A friend of mine, whose hobby it is to browse horse sale ads, told me about an auction that was about two hours away and held every month.  She said the horses that went through looked decent and there were no kill pens or kill buyers at the sales.  I had actually watched part of an auction held at that location back in January.  The prices were nuts.  Horses that were just basic horses with no advanced training were easily selling for $7 - 12,000, which put them well out of my price range.  But apparently prices were coming down and my friend said the last auction had horses that sold for much more reasonable prices that were within my budget.

I decided that it was worth a try before I gave up completely.  A few days before the auction, listings started being posted on Facebook.  Many listings had video in addition to photos, plus a short description.  My friend and I weeded through them, looking for the horses that would be likely to be in the ballpark of what I was looking for.  I involved Gemma too, and we watched and rewatched the videos.  I made a spreadsheet of all the horses and flagged the ones we thought were worth learning more about and crossed out those that definitely would not work.

I took the day before the auction off of work so Gemma and I could drive up to the facility and look at any horses that were coming in early.  I also thought that would be a good way to find the best route to the facility and ask about how the process worked, so I wasn't trying to deal with that on the day of the auction.

So last Friday, Gemma and I headed out to the barn to take care of Donut and Star in the morning, then stopped at home to eat lunch and pack some snacks before driving up to the auction facility.  We hit some ridiculous traffic.  I mean, who are all these people on the road at 2 pm???  I also argued with my phone's navigation app, which seemed to want to take me on a weird route.  But we finally made it.  My first lesson learned was that I should have paid more attention to the route, and I planned to take a different way home.

And then we started getting the lay of the land.  First we walked around the facility, learning where the sales ring was, where the horses were kept, where the arena was, where the bathrooms were, etc.  I found an employee and asked about how the buying process worked.  Unfortunately, at that time, the horses that were there didn't have their hip numbers on yet, the stalls weren't labeled, and the catalog wasn't printed.  So we had to work off the Facebook pictures and my spreadsheet, but bit by bit, Gemma and I figured out who the horses were.  A few were on our favorites list, and several more were on our second tier list.  I found a couple of sellers and started asking questions.

Some of the horses were taken out to the arena to be ridden as well, so we watched as many as we could.  When we weren't wandering around looking at horses, we watched the tack auction that had started to get a feel for what it would be like to see the horse auction.  While we were there, we saw a trailer pull up and the most stunning dapple gray stock horse was unloaded.  He had a presence, and I was impressed.  I knew immediately who he was, based on the descriptions and pictures I'd seen on Facebook and he was one that I'd crossed off because his description made him sound like a very serious roping horse.  But something about seeing him in person made me want to take a second look.

After a few more minutes of watching the tack auction, Gemma and I headed down to the arena.  The gray was already there being worked and I found his seller.  I asked her lots of questions about him and got some video to watch later and send to my friend who was helping me.  She has an amazing ability to assess gaits and temperament based on years and years and years of managing a big barn and working in multiple lesson programs.  

One of the best bits of advice I got about buying a horse came from Bruce Weary, a skilled endurance rider who posts on the AERC Facebook page regularly.  He said he just lets the seller talk, because they might say something that is useful that you wouldn't have thought to ask.  In the case of the gray, that strategy worked really well.  The seller just kept talking about him and eventually she mentioned that he had been a stallion for seven years and had recently been gelded.  So that explained the presence I had seen, and I moved the gray back to the Do Not Buy Under Any Circumstances List.  Also, note to self that if I am looking at a gelding, remember to ask WHEN he was gelded!

The gray had a young boy riding him, I guess as a way of promoting the gelding as kid-friendly.  (Also, note to self, just because a child is riding a horse does not mean the horse is appropriate for a child to ride.)  Unfortunately, the boy didn't ride anything like Gemma.  He was cowboy through and through, but not in a good way.  The more I watched at this auction, the more I came to understand that I was in a very different world.  The riders were truly horrifying.  There was a lot of spurring and yanking on the horse's mouth.  Everyone seemed to want the horses to spin and back and run fast.  But there was nothing beautiful about it.  Somehow the idea of what they were looking for had been perverted and the horses and riders moved like a caricature, with all of the bad parts highlighted, yet no one seemed to understand.

It is incredibly hard to evaluate a horse for movement when it is ridden poorly.  And it is hard to evaluate temperament too.  Lots of the horses were amped up by the constant spurring and yanking and running.  But they may have been delightfully calm otherwise.  I realized my job was going to be harder than I'd thought.  But I kept looking and asking questions.

There was one mare in particular that I really wanted to look at plus one gelding.  In my opinion, the gelding was the best mover I'd seen based on the videos posted.  My only concern about him was his size.  He was 16.1, which was bigger than I was looking for.  But my first horse had been 16 hands and I don't remember having much trouble with that.  The horse's temperament and movement were more important to me.  Meanwhile, the mare looked like she was exactly what I was looking for.  She was 15.2, 8 years old, and she had some local hunter show experience and had already been started over fences.  One of the ad pictures showed her jumping something that might have been 2 feet, and she was clearing it by a pretty big margin.  There was definitely some jumping talent.  What I didn't know was what she looked like under saddle or her temperament.

But do you think I could find the sellers for either of those two horses?  Nope.  We walked around and around, and kept coming back to their stalls every few minutes.  But no sellers.  Eventually, I decided we had seen everything we could see and we needed to get home.

Because we still had about five horses on our favorites list that we hadn't had a chance to learn more about, I planned to get to the auction at least an hour and a half before the bidding started the next day to see if I could track down the sellers and see these horses under saddle before I made my decision about which horses, if any, I would bid on.

On the way home, Gemma and I talked about what we'd seen that day.  I tried to explain to her what I felt I couldn't say at the auction.  That the way people were riding wasn't good for the horses.  I didn't want her to think that what she'd seen was a good example.  But she knew already.  And she had other things to talk about.  She wanted to remind me about that one mare that seemed like a good fit on paper.  She told me that standing next to that mare made her feel the same way she did when she stood next to Star.  To be honest, I thought she might have been exaggerating because she was so desperate to get a horse.  I could have bought any one of them for her, and she would have been over the moon.  Which made me wary of trusting her feedback.  In hindsight, I should have known better...