From shady horse dealers to unsatisfied Tamworth Classic buys, every horse rider has their horror story. How many times have you heard of someone buying a horse that wasn’t quite what it was advertised as? Therefor in this Blog post ill share with you the things you can do to make sure you don’t get the wool pulled over your eyes.

In todays world more and more people are buying horses online and from sales. The online trend is only going to increase as we slowly move to a more virtual system for doing everything. Hell, we might even be riding the computers soon. “Into the pen next we have Mark Buttsworth riding One Stylish Pepto 3000 model”, like the bloke needs any more help! This being said there are still checks we can do. In order to minimise the chance of us ending up with a fat lap dog instead of Phar Lap have a look at this checklist.

Buying a Horse -sale Check list

Before you go to a big horse sale and run around the joint asking all the trainers to pull this horse and that horse out. Only to then look at it from 10 meters away and say “yep all good iv seen what I needed” you should have a check list. Here is the Checklist I do with all horses I look at without the ability to ride them. (provided the owner condones it)

Checklist

1. Give it a good pat all over (watch how it reacts).
2. See how the horse reacts to you being in its space i.e is it cranky or sour towards you.
3. Pick up all feet, does it hold its own weight or does it lean on you
4. Check all legs and body for any scars or abrasions.
5. What are its feet like? clubby or misshapen?
6. If its a mare you would consider breeding to later, ask if it’s had any foals and if there were any complications. Did it go in foal the first 2 try’s?
7. Take it for a jog on the lead and see how it reacts. Most horses never do this so its a good way to see how the horse reacts to something new.
8. Ask lots about the mother and any other progeny from the mare’s side. Every horse is out of a decent sire at the sales these days, it’s the mare we are more concerned about.
9. Search the horses name on Facebook, often if it has already been through a sale there will be sale prices and videos for you to look at.
10. Ask what the reserve is, it can feel like asking what colour underpants your wearing. However it doesn’t help you to loose a horse you could have gotten because you were waiting for one you could never afford.
11. Ask who trained it and how long they had it for. There is a big difference between “had cutting training” and “fully cutting trained”.
12. Video the pre-works, if something happens and you missed it you might get a rood shock later on.

A few tips for buying a horse in general

1. Take a knowledgeable friend when buying a horse

Even if you know horses like the back of your hand it always pays to have a second opinion. Even if you end up going against what they think at least you didn’t just go into the sale blindly.

2. Before you buy a horse ask yourself, can I sell it?

In the event that you don’t get along with the horse it is definitely good to know you can sell it to someone else. If you decide you don’t get along its far harder to sell a horse with baggage. Examples of baggage/hard things to sell are: temperament, bad feet, injury’s or bad habits.

3. Don’t buy a horse and try to “fix it”

Don’t buy a horse with problems thinking your going to fix them, this is not an episode of fixeruper’s. In some cases bad habits are able to be helped or even fixed. But Starting your journey with a horse attempting to fix someone else’s problems is never something I would suggest. As a general rule if the horse is older than 10 years old, the odds of you changing their habits is very slim.

4. Buy a horse that suits your skill level

It doesn’t help anyone if you overstate your ability. In the case of a performance horse in particular, there is no point having a level 3 rider on a level 10 horse. There is of course the case of the good old horse that will come back for a lower level rider, however they are few and far between.

5. Vet check

In the case of an expensive horse, previously injured horse or prospective owner having a lack of knowledge, I think a vet check is a must. However the Vet must be an equine vet experienced with lame horses, otherwise you might as well not do one at all.

End notes

Buying a horse and selling horses can be the best part or the worst part of owning horses depending on how the transaction ends out. To make sure it’s the best part we need to keep our whit’s about us and make sure we do everything possible to keep the risk to a minimum.

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