Hi guys!
I am considering purchasing a horse from Lone Star Kill Pen in Justin TX. According to the ad, Norman is 16.2hh 6 year old warmblood gelding. He was owned by two older ladies who couldn’t handle him anymore and dropped him off at the sale. Does anyone recognize him? He seems much too nice to go to slaughter (on Monday if not saved). Link to picture below…
Hmm. Generally horses end up at low end auctions because they have no resale value in the regular market. If you put up a FB ad or note in the feed store for an un broke WB prospect 6 years old, sound and sane, for under $5000, you’d have a lineup of young trainers outside your door by supper time. Of course they will all want to see the horse move and vet him. And see his papers.
So the fact this horse is going to a low end auction is a red flag. It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong. But proceed carefully. He could be a psychopath. He could have a serious physical injury.
Also WB is a very widely used term. It can be loosely applied to TB x drafts, doesn’t necessarily mean registered with a selective European registry. I don’t love his conformation particularly his hind end. I don’t think he’s a high level prospect.
If he is a registered WB it is extremely likely he’s microchipped. To me he looks more like a harness type than a sporthorse.
I’ve Googled the sales site.
Apparently no one can be just a low end horse dealer anymore. You either have to be a Rescue or a Kill Pen Dealer to add that extra emotional “story” to your “product.”
The FB account for Lonestar makes it clear they are mostly dealing in lower end broke riding horses that are presumably serviceably sound. The Kill Pen part of their name adds an urgency, with the threat these horses are going to slaughter if they don’t sell. Now I have no idea if LS is also in the business of buying and selling meat horses as well as being a low end dealer of riding horses. Or if they are a “kill pen rescue.”
I agree that if he is a WB, he might be a harness line, which are increasingly popular in the US because of the Amish communities.
Poor, poor boy! I’ve read the detailed research article about this sort of kill pens’ type of “business” (and it sounds very logical) but still my heart sinks when I see such plea posts 
the biggest fear of selling my boy is that he’ll end up there one day 
Looks like an Appendix Quarter horse type that was probably dumped due to the quittor type growth on the inside of his right hind hoof. You can see it in several of the photos on their page. This is an expensive and extensive Vet bill. Poor horse may never recover or be sound.
These faux and real kill pen pages are nothing more than low life horse flippers where the proceeds, in some cases, directly funds horse slaughter. In any case, these horses were not bought for slaughter but to resell to bleeding hearts. These places are also cesspools of communicable diseases like Strangles. Notice the white nasal discharge in this photo.
If you are looking for a young, tall, sound, athletic, Warmblood chances are highly unlikely to find that on a kill pen page. Even pre COVID. You would have better luck finding that needle in a haystack on Craigs List.
This horse does not look like a warmblood but more importantly he appears to have a nasal discharge, which could be minor or it could be very much NOT minor. Proceed with caution.
He looks really sweet in the pictures, but I assume you can’t vet him first. That said, I’ve bought a horse from a similar sale…
She was sweet/not lame when we got her…but when we got her home she was a completely different horse. Vet found a rotten half of a tooth in her mouth. The horse was so head shy she required full anesthesia to remove the tooth and the vet found a partially shattered and abcessed jaw around that tooth. Got her through it, and she got mean. Horse obviously expected pain while being handled and had learned to fight in response to it. Fortunately the horse’s base personality was to be sweet because after a year of working with her she was perfectly happy to be loved on as a pasture pet. Then horse started having farrier problems. X-rays revealed holes in her navicular bones on both fronts. Horse was PTS after escalating behavior. She wasn’t safe to shoe and she wasn’t sound with out shoes.
Never again will I buy a horse out of that kind of sale.
If the horse is being advertised by Lonestar, it won’t ship - they just say that to sucker people in to purchasing horses for more than they’re worth.
I bet the backstory you received is completely phony.
Quit giving these vultures money.
That looks like a slightly underfed quarter horse.
It’s a nice looking horse but as others have said don’t support these businesses. If you actually want to help horses, either buy them at the auction so you don’t give the money to kill buyers and horse flippers, or go volunteer at your local horse rescue.
run the street address than go to Google satellite view and zoom in on the operation… if that does not make you question the credibility of the operation do the street drive by view
I live about twenty miles south of this operation and never ever heard of it
Without papers or a microchip, it’s hard to say if that’s a WB. I did see a nice warmblood go through the Cranbury auctions a few years ago. I contacted her breeder and it was the same mare. Put the breeder in touch with a potential buyer and I think they paid $1K for her. Nice mare but she’d picked up some behavioral issues in the time between when the breeder sold her and the folks bought her. They were quite experienced so fingers crossed it worked out. BUT, it’s never as simple as those Kill Pen Dealers make out and a lot of the time the backstory is pure fiction.
Edited to add, that based on other posts on the Internet, the horses at Lone Star Kill Pen are generally priced quite a bit over kill prices – $1200, $1400, some smaller ones around $1K. A lot of the “Kill Pen” resellers buy nicer horses at auction with no intention of sending them to slaughter but merely to resell them. I’m not saying this is the case here, but there’s a lot of documentation out there of others who behave this way.
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