We have an older mare here that we pulled out of a kill pen last summer. She’s a sweetheart, quiet & serviceably sound for light work, but not a good fit for our lesson barn (not quite sound enough for our workload, etc).
One of our adult students has asked about buying her and it sounds like a good fit (they get along, she would only do light trail riding with the horse, etc).
However, we want to be responsible & stand by the horse and try to avoid her ending up in the same place we pulled her from.
So we’d like to include a buy back clause in the contract so that the buyer has the option (is “encouraged” to?) return her to us when she isn’t able to/doesn’t want to care for the old gal any longer.
I understand that buy back clauses are difficult to enforce and I am mostly thinking of it as a way to initiate the conversation of “if you can’t care for the horse any more, give us a call rather than sending her to the auction down the road” - while being a little more “formal”.
Any advice on wording it?
(we’ll be talking with our attorney as well but he isn’t an equine law person and “examples” have been helpful as starting points in our conversations in the past).
nb: We’d rather not lease the mare out from a liability point of view as our attorney advised us to avoid the scenario of owning/co-owning a horse kept somewhere else who injures a family on the road in the middle of the night.
