I have occasionally looked at the Standardbred names and they are allowed to change the name even after the horse has raced (unlike TBs), but they keep a list of all the names the horse has been registered as and they are searchable by any of those names. Why can’t USEF do this? Horse gets registered under name A/owner A. Owner B wants to change it, fine pay the fee, change it, and show under it, but keep the old name in the file so somebody searching can still find the horse and it’s full record, breeding, and breeder.
USE does record this way. It’s just that new owners CHOOSE not to do a name change and instead do a new recording. USE absolutely allows you to buy a horse, change the name, and keep the same number. When you look up the horse, his past names are listed. You can search but current name or any name. The system fully supports this already. People just don’t do it.
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That makes sense. I obviously haven’t had to do this. Hopefully with the microchips the new recordings will be less of a problem.
Most of the time the name change process isn’t very difficult, but there are certain circumstances that make it almost impossible. My horse spend most of his young life in Canada, so he was registered with Equine Canada and FEI, not USEF. He was leased out to a US kid right before I bought him, who registered him with USEF/USHJA in her name since the owner was not a USEF member. I tried to transfer ownership from her to me with USEF, but since there was no bill of sale between us (as I bought him from his actual owner, not the girl who leased him), I couldn’t. There was also the matter of the spelling of his name, breed info, and birth year all being incorrect in the USEF records. It was also more expensive to transfer the ownership, convert the recording to a lifetime registration, and change the name than just create a new record. So I just went ahead and created a new one.
I can imagine there are lots of people who bought a horse from say, a sales barn who didn’t change the registration name. So when you buy it and go to change the registration, the bill of sale you have has a different owner name than what USEF has. At that point it becomes much, much easier to just create a new USEF record.
I wasn’t impugning the motives of people who choose to get a new number… I’m just saying that there is a system in place to change names and keep the same number.
I have been currently dealing with probably a worst case scenario of this.
The issue (as I have seen it) is that there was a time when new registrations were cheaper than correcting a name.
In my most recent interaction I saw a horse’s name changed once for just not liking the actual registered name with its breed and then when sold on the same thing rang true but they also decided to make the horse 3 years younger.
While it’s a complex situation now, I believe that microchips will help with this issue. Or at least I hope they will.
Em
Oh I had an issue myself with it back in the day. Horse was lifetime registered with the USEF as owned by a partnership. Over the years, he went to live with one partner. That partner sold him to me (no objection whatsoever from the other partner). I had a bill of sale to me from the one partner (I had no idea the horse’s original USEF registration showed him as owner by a partnership). They gave me a HELLISH hassle over getting him transferred into my name. It would have absolutely been quicker/easier just to do a new registration. So I get it, I’ve been there.
But that doesn’t mean that they system doesn’t allow name changes while keeping the same number/old show records/association with the old name. The system absolutely DOES. Christa P seemed to think it didn’t, but it does. Why people do a new registration instead of a name change is a whole other issue. As to whether the system allows a name change, it does.
Nice pedigree.
It’s a name I might change too, doesn’t lend itself well as a show horse. BUT, the issue as far as what is best for horses (especially OTTBs) is that if you keep the current name as his show name, IF he does well at the shows, he advertises his family and bloodline as one that has proven to be successful as a show horse, making it more likely that someone may want to buy something from his family themselves. It helps other OTTBs if you keep his name, which is able to be searched and his pedigree can be easily found. So I’d be slow to decide if a name change as a show name is what you want to do. Perhaps it will be. Perhaps not. In the old days, when competition for good OTTBs was fierce and competitive, names were changed on purpose, to conceal what the breeding on the horse was… so that the same show rider could follow the family privately, and not have to outbid other buyers for relatives of their superstar. Things have changed for OTTBs since those days.
And yes, he will probably will have a barn name. If you ask his previous owners or trainer or barn staff at the track, they can tell you what name he has gone by, and may recognise in your care. It may be so horrible that you are forced to change that too, but it is worth asking. When I bought my stallion, Persian Star, from friends at the track, I asked what his barn name was. “Stretchy”. I baulked on using that for a few months. But eventually, I called him by his barn name out in his paddock. His head came up sharply, and turned towards me, and he came to me right away. And he continued as Stretchy until his dying day, last year, at 25 years old.
Not sure if it matters or if you care, but Buzz Lightyear was a pretty famous pony in the hunter world.
http://www.chronofhorse.com/article/infinity-and-beyond-buzz-light-year
