CANTER Mid Atlantic has already had a retraining program in place for several years and we actually do have horses that are the cream of the crop. Yes, a few have had very minor injuries that have been rehabbed slowly but otherwise we have fields full of lovely sound horses.
Our group has worked very hard with trainers to get them to donate horses and be ensured that they will get the required time off, proper retraining and be placed in the best of homes. There are still MANY trainers who care more about the home than the money but you have to prove to them you are legit and not just there to flip the horses for a quick buck.
All of our horses get minimum of 2 months of turnout to just be a horse before they are even available to be sold. Then we start to put the basics on them. They learn to w/t/c, jump courses, go trail riding, go off the farm and go to little shows. They have a lot of mileage put on so that we can figure out what jobs they want to do, what type of person they will fit and soundness. They all get teeth done, chiro and feet fixed. They are given as much time as they need.
I believe the horses we have are priced very fairly but at the same time these are super nice sound horses and if you want to return money to your operation like a responsible organization should then you should have a business plan in place to make money. We are trying to take horses that are sound and will be able to be rehomed fairly easy in the market.
We can save a lot more horses by taking the sound horses that find homes compared to horses that are unsound and canāt be rehomed. Judybigredpony- our program moves a lot of horses so I would argue that rescues that have programs like CANTER does can compete quite successfully with a regular person who is retraining. I basically volunteer to do the retraining and do all the work with the horses. We now have several people who are highly qualified in retraining these guys and we are moving horses left and right. People are eager to buy horses that are restarted properly and priced realistically.
I find that the buying public can be very restrictive in their horse shopping habits. I have a field full of lovely sound 15.3 ish mares who are all flashy. Yet, no interest in them at all. Now the 16+ h geldings are in demand and I get tons and tons of emails but when you say they are $2500 people think they can do better elsewhere. Ha, let them go to the track and buy them, then let them down, then do the teeth, then vet out the minor issues, then spend the time to get the feet right and chiro and all the other basic mileage. Tell me how much that cost;) Not to mention you are buying unknown and taking a risk the horse will do the job you intend for it to do. Very hard to tell standing there looking at a horse at the track. Not to say there is anything wrong from buying from the track but it does have itās risks.
I work with Bev from Mid Atlantic Horse Rescue to help trainers move some horses and she will take some of sound horses that we might not have room for. The have the same sort of program and they are successful at moving horses. They also give them time off and then get them restarted. Horses are priced at $2k and up.
It really comes down to marketing and networking. I find a lot of people still donāt know we have a program in place where horses are getting training. We are reaching out to a lot of upper level riders across the disciplines and marketing our horses to them. We now have a good system in place where people are coming to us eager to buy horses that are let down and restarted properly. I have seen the retraining program grow and the number of horses we are placing increase.
One of the hardest things to overcome when you are a rescue advertising horses is to make people understand that the horses donāt have anything wrong with them. Rescue is a very negative word to many people so I always try to phrase it as ārehoming.ā I get giddy when I head to our layup farms and look at all the lovely horses we have hanging out ready to get going.
