Bounce is our five-year-old Irish-bred.
As I was saying last week, it is far easier over there to find your ‘young rider’s packer’ or ‘amateur one star horse’ aboard than it is here. This is due to two reasons:
1. What most people don’t know is that in the UK they have a point system that once you reach a certain number of points one MUST upgrade. So you cannot just sit happily winning Prelim forever over there as you can here. Once those horses make up their points they must move up. But what if they are not good enough to move up? Thus they get sold, and the UK does not nearly have the amateur market that America does.
2. They are selling countries not the land of International Velvet Syndrome. Now again, before you hate on me, I am a product of International Velvet Syndrome myself. When I had my first horse, a $4,000 trackie mare, I was sure I was going to the Olympics with her and she would have never been for sale not for all the tea in China despite the fact that, in truth, she was a useless, bad moving, bad jumping, hotter than hell, Thoroughbred that ended up dying on top of me at Prelim cross country due to a heart condition. But what I mean is that I understand our culture and have lived it and loved it all my life. In Ireland however, most of those kids are brought up to sell. They are not living in Disney La-La Land and they have been raised to know they have to sell horses to have a business and when you offer them money they will sell you their horse. Everything has a price.
If you go up to an amateur or a young rider in this country and ask if their horse is for sale because you fancy it for yourself or a client, more often than not they will look at you as if you have four heads and tell you that, of course, even though they are never going to ride Trigger past training themselves they will in no circumstances sell him. If you ask a kid in Ireland the same question after watching them roar around a xc track they will more often than no reply to you, “Let me go ask my dad” and come back to you with a price.
Thus to find a good, solid, young rider type horse there is much easier. Sure, there are one or two about here, but again one would spend a day traveling to California to look at one, and then over to Virginia to look at another, where as we can see at least two or three a day over in the UK.
Just now, we were over with a gal looking for her dream amateur two star horse and we were able to show her four perfect examples in two days and then on the third day she retried her top three choices. Boom. Shopping done in three days. Love it. I would be very hard pressed to find four horses here that were for sale with that kind of show record. Once I found them, I can promise you they would not all be located in the same state unless *perhaps* it is March and you are in Aiken or Ocala.
2. They will show off their horse.
The English and Irish know how to show off their horses. Often, when I go to look at a four-year-old in this country, it will be in either one of two categories: totally unbroke, or, stuck in a school never let outside it and fiddled to death onto the bit.
You may not be able to steer an Irish four-year-old, but I can guarantee you that it will have hacked down the lanes and through the fields, it will show off its paces and it will jump a bloody big fence. Not a course of them, but they are not afraid to show you what the horse can do and more often than not they will come cantering down to a 3’9″ vertical or oxer without batting an eyelid or jump over a ditch or into water without hesitation. The Irish EXPECT you to want to see what the horse can do. Often here, when we go to look, the people will have them fixed on the bit, and they may be great at doing circles, but the horses would wet themselves if you ever took them down the road with traffic or the people want you to buy the horses after just seeing them over a single 2′ rail.
3. Assuming you are buying a performance horse and not a Cairn, the price is similar.
If you are attempting to buy either a prospect, or a packer, either way, the prices buying from overseas and getting them home compared to what you will pay here is surprisingly comparable.
Now before I get roasted here, I repeat, I am not speaking about those who are looking to find the off the track diamond (which indeed exists, just ask Becky Holder, she has both of them!) or those buying pets or lower level prospects… Of course you can find any of the above for bargain prices…. but IF you are looking to buy yourself a two star packer, or a real smart prospect of a young horse, the prices are often similar whether importing or buying one here.
I am fond of the saying ‘If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys’. Horses, like all good things in life, are expensive, and the nicer the horse the more expensive it will tend to be, just like cars, houses or wives (wink wink).
For a nice young horse, with a little experience, I would expect to *generally* spend $30-40,000 USD to my doorstep. For that I would expect something that is well broke (as far as safety), appears to have a brain, is a nice mover, a good jumper, is bred in such a way that I would hope it will gallop and get the trip, and has had some kind of small life experience, be it hunting, schooling shows, young horse classes etc. Naturally, if I can find it for cheaper, that’s great, and there have been times we have paid more than that for something that had more of a resume, but that would be our ball park number for a young horse that ‘shined’. Not the millions of plain horses you see online, but one that had something a little bit special about it.
For most, that will seem a very large number, but again *most* are not shopping for something that shines. I can completely understand this as when I go to my son’s soccer games most of his peers’ moms are driving BMWs, Mercedes, or at the very least a Volkswagen. When I pull up in my $18,000 Mazda SUV, I can’t believe what they are spending on their apple juice and cereal transport vehicles. Although, when I pull in next to them, I can certainly see the difference in the price just looking at the vehicle with my ignorant eyes without even understanding the more important price differences such as power, engine, etc. For me, who drives to and from school pick up and grocery stores in my car, my quality of car is not that important to me. It need not be fast or fancy, have wicked good mileage to the gallon, or any bells and whistles. As long as it goes and is safe, that covers what I need in a car. Thus I can have the cheap one. The horses I sit on are an entirely different thing though. I will spend twice as much on a green five-year-old than I will on my car. You know why? Well there are a few reasons, but for starters, when I go out on that five-year-old I put my life to some extent in his hands and thus I wish not to be sat on an idiot nor a klutz.
What really blows my horn is when I have parents that roll into the yard in a $60,000 car and tell me they want to spend $30,000 on an Intermediate horse for their kid so that they can aim for Young Riders. That parent would never allow their kids to drive a car that was missing its doors, had no seatbelts and had sketchy breaks and steering that got stuck more often than not down the freeway, but they want to be cheap when putting their kids on top of an animal, slapping it on the bum and telling them to go jump around solid objects with them. My parents were similar minded in that they bought the aforementioned $4,000 OTTB for me as my first horse. My parents are genius and very good people, yet they were ignorant as all get out on the topic of horses and got very bad advice indeed. I suppose one may argue that without said $4,000 Thoroughbred, I may never had had my start in horses, but just as easily, I could of been dead on any number of occasions but got lucky.. but alas lol.. I digress…
I have gotten off topic, but what I mean to say is that when I see nice horses in this country, for example, from Kingridge (whom we have bought a young horse from that ended up being a Rolex horse) and from Iron Springs (whom we bought a young horse from that ended up a three star horse) they tend to be in the $30,000-50,000 price range, easily for a nicely started five-year-old that they believe has potential. So using the above two farms as examples, who are both my friends btw, I may purchase from them a nice young horse for $30,000 and then have to wonder whether it will end up galloping, as more often than not their horses are pure Warmbloods with very little blood if any.
Of the eventers I mentioned above that are breeding now their own good stock, they are not giving their horses away either, I can assure you. I tried one of the aforementioned breeder’s four-year-olds that couldn’t even pick up the right canter lead yet, but did have a very good jump and decent gaits, and they asked $40,000 for it. I have seen one of the others advertising their four-year-olds for $30,000 and up. So moral of the story… you get what you pay for anywhere in the world and it is surprisingly comparable to import.
The only thing I really see that you are losing financially from going abroad is the cost of your trip there. But often I find for North Americans, the experience of the trip is well worth the money spent on it. We try to incorporate into our clients’ buying trips a bit of ‘authentic English horse life’ if you will, and often manage to take a trip around Badminton or Burghley grounds while we are driving, try to stumble upon a hunt if it is the right time of year, and certainly sharing a meal with Leslie and his friends and hearing the tales of those guys is value for money entertainment!
Myself, I have been over to that side of the world probably 20 times now horse shopping, but even still, having grown up in Canada, there is something kind of ‘little girl magical’ about stepping into an English yard, smelling the haylage and watching them pull the shiny horses out with their feet painted onto the roads to jog up for you. So many times here I will go look at a horse and they will pull out a beautiful creature and I will think, “that looks like a show jumper” or “that looks like a dressage horse,” but over there, I can more often than not look at a horse they pull out and think, “now that looks like it should be galloping and jumping hedges and moats!” That feeling alone makes it worth the trip for many of us lifelong horse loving girls and as long as you find two horses you like, so if one fails the vet you are hopefully covered, Leslie and I have done our job.
So how do we change things here? I was going to add in here an entire section on what I thought we had to change here in North America to make it more attractive for buyers to do all of their shopping here at home, but then I stopped myself and erased it. I am not a breeder, nor will I pretend to understand the myriads of obstacles that they face and difficulties within. Although I am perhaps too good at giving my opinion lol, I would like to think that at least I keep it to subjects of which I am experienced in, and breeding I am not.
I do hope that event horse breeders continue to get stronger and stronger over here. I suspect in the near future we are going to see quite a few amazing horses come out of Ms. Mars’ yard as she is breeding very good stock (Harbor Pilot!) AND is employing very good riders to produce them. Yet, clearly Ms. Mars alone is not going to supply North America with the horses we need, so I certainly hope others come along in force and join her. For those out there that have the horses now and bemoan the lack of buyers, please get your horses out there! Email me and other riders video of your four- and five-year-olds, get them on the websites, publicize them!
Save me from many more years of Disney-brat-flights, bank robbery commission fees, and carsickness.
