[QUOTE=magnolia73;3944254]
Hindsight is 20/20. If the shipper can remember every horse on his truck, I’d be suprised. Surely things get confusing. Likely that the people handling these horses are paid staff, probably somewhat poorly paid. I doubt MW or FM are unloading these horses or even tacking them up. I imagine if MW was expecting some modest childrens jumper that he did not even lay eyes on the horse or sit on it.
As a kid, my trainer worked with a big sales barn to get in horses for us to try. I had one for a week trial that stayed for over a month because the sales barn forgot about him. You’d get in horses that were X and they’d turn out to be Y. I think a lot of the times they never even set hoof in the sales barn and I doubt the owner of the sales barn ever set eyes on many of them, much less rode them to assess. I think that’s how nobody realizes good old GG’s more than a childrens jumper… And who the hell calls up and says “hey- that children’s jumper you leased me is spectacular- I think there is something funny going on…”.
I don’t know anything about any of these businesses. But I have a feeling that you have a few star horses that get careful treatment and the rest, due to sheer volume probably don’t get the same level of attention/thought that our privately owned horses do. Yes, they get care, very good care, but don’t have one individual really watching over them.[/QUOTE]
I don’t expect the shipper to necessarily remember right of the top of his head-- but are there no records? No controls/methods to ensure horses are correctly delivered?
Imagine this was a package and you got the wrong one (someone else’s package whose name is spelled very similarly to yours). The UPS driver might not recall the package from memory but if you gave UPS the date, they could pull up a list of all the packages and maybe figure out if some got swapped based on similar name/addresses. That’s the first thing they would do if you reported a problem with a package, pull up the records and see if that had any clue to explain what happened. They wouldn’t respond “golly gee, what could have happened” and provide no info. They’d be looking for possible explanations based on the records they have of what was delivered that day from that truck/driver.
Why, when notified of a mixup-- didn’t the shipper seemingly have ANY information about possible avenues to search. Even if there were 20 other horses on the truck and they were neon blue colored-- you would have thought the shipped would have the names/drop off addresses/contact info and would be calling those places to see if there was some confusion. How many horses were on this truck and how many stops? Why didn’t the shipper call all the stops and ask if a horse was accidentally unloaded. If the mistake was a simple swap of two horses on the trailer, it ought to have been a snap to narrow down where the horse was and explain what happened. It was a finite number of horses/stops. Even if he made lots of stops and loaded/offloaded lots of horses-- it’s still a finite number of avenues to check.
Can anyone just take any horse off a trailer? Is that how it works? No recordkeeping or control at all? Any old groom can saunter up and take off any horse s/he’d like. No signing for the horse? No checking coggins/records? No inspection of the horse’s condition? Nothing? I genuinely want to know, I have never used a large commercial shipper like this and would have THOUGHT there was lots of control/recordkeeping-- to protect the shipper himself/herself!
– who could look at the paperwork that followed these two animals and not have gone, “Uhhhhhh…”
