Unsound Horse Purchases

[Baycob]

In the last while there have been 3 different recently purchased horses at my yard that have been unsound. 2 out of the 3 will likely never come sound. My question is - why do people sell unsound horses ? Instead of being passed pillar to post why not PTS if you can’t afford to keep ?

And why isn’t vetting a priority ? I realise a 3 stage can be failed one day and passed the next, but come on!! One of these horses was so very obviously lame! A vet can spot major things.

Simple answer: money I'm afraid. I think some people are in financial difficulty and are desperate to get rid and make a profit in the process. It's awful

I have horsey friends this has happened to recently.

I thought things were bad enough when I was buying in 2018. We had two potential horses fail vets inspections at the very last stage of the process and I was pissed off that the owners had concealed issues. Total waste of time and money in terms of vets fees and travel but it could have been worse. And there have been a couple of well publicised cases where a dodgy vet has been in cohoots with the owner.

Totally agree about vets inspections. Buyer beware every time.

That should have read "totally agree about vets inspections in general though".

I really think horse sales should be regulated and vets should store a centralised medical history with all horses microchipped!

Maybe if sellers had to provide a clean vetting cert before selling. There are just too many unsound horses out there it seems. Then people breeding from unsound mares despite not knowing if there is a genetic element to the unsoundness.

Another thing I see is a preference for sporty horses without the budget and knowledge to match. So many ex racers sold to novices then again passed from pillar to post.

I do agree, our yard is a bit of a catalogue of injured and lame horses right (including one of mine sadly!), some of them very recently purchased for £££ over lockdown. Unfortunately I think it's a bit of a perfect storm, particularly in the current market where fairly ordinary horses are suddenly worth mega bucks in a crazy sellers market - a combination of naive/ignorant buyers and sellers being willing to move on their unsound horses and be to a lesser or greater extent dishonest about it. With the latter it can be on a scale from a private/amateur seller in genuine ignorance their horse is lame, to the competent but 'head in the sand' type that can see there's an issue but thinks horse will be fine 'in a quieter home'/light work (particularly an issue with older and competition horses that can be totally temperamentally unsuited to said 'light work' before you take lameness into account) to the full-on dodgy dealer just out to make a quick buck and will utilise all tools from the hard sell to the sob story to the medicine cabinet to get the horse sold.

It's just a bit of a sad fact of life that where you have lots of money changing hands you will get people being less than totally open and honest - you get the exact same thing with car sales. I don't think there's much appetite from government to regulate it as it's 'caveat emptor' - but I do agree that I really don't understand why when people are prepared to spend well north of £5k on a horse they won't spend £500 on a vetting. That being said at least one of the recent expensive purchases on my yard that's now crocked had passed a 5 stage before going lame virtually the day it arrived on the yard so a vetting/health certificate isn't a guarantee, horses are just fragile unfortunately...

What I don’t understand is when people don’t ask permission to speak to the sellers vet. If the seller won’t give permission it’s a giveaway there has been an issue they haven’t told you about.
At one viewing I asked about vet history and was told “ we’ve been very lucky and only needed the vet for vaccinations”. Then at the end of the viewing looked surprised when I asked to speak to her vet to confirm this. Turned out there had been lameness work up and X-rays recently, lucky escape.

And the answer re the indiscriminate breeding is, sadly, that there is literally no money to be made in breeding 'properly' outside of the thoroughbred or sports horse market (and precious little even then). My late aunt and uncle for many years ran a small Welsh sec A stud farm for many years, they were primarily breeding to show but all their youngsters that didn't make the grade for showing (which was the majority!) were sold as 4 or 5 year olds as children's ponies. These were really super super types, each mating planned carefully for health, soundness and temperament with the pedigree of both dam and sire known in great detail going back multiple generations, and the offspring were pretty, good movers, nice personalities, made fantastic lead rein or 1st riddens (I had one myself as a child and later had a string of them for my own DC). They had been brought up around children, dogs and on a busy farm so were bombproof and had been very carefully broken in and brought on - literally the dream pony, the perfect example of 'discriminate' (if that's a word!) breeding. Even in the early days they didn't make much of a profit from it, and by the time they packed it in in the 2000s each pony was actually costing them thousands - and bearing in mind this was all done as much on a shoestring as possible in the UK, on their own land in a cheap part of the country, feeding their own hay and all the ridden work and training done by my aunt with no external help...but you can't get away from things like vets bills, feed costs, maintaining the land, farrier to trim every 6 weeks etc etc. I can't imagine that things are much better today even with the recent massive upturn in horse prices.

So that's why you just get people without much experience or knowledge slinging any old mare to any old stallion and bringing up the offspring with minimal care and attention, then trying to then get £££ for it. I'm not saying there aren't still good breeders of cobs, native types etc out there but they must be doing it purely for the love of the game as I'm quite sure they can't be turning a profit!