I think she’s just trying to collect what she is owed for board, hence the low dollar amount. It’s sad, and I feel for both the owner of the horses and the barn owner who was put in this situation. It is so easy to get upside down financially when owners don’t pay their bills.
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It’s an auction, not really a choice. This is legally her only recourse. Starting bid is what is owed on the horses. It that is not met, then legally the horses belong to the farm. They could auction for more than the $11k, and hopefully there are people who are lined up to bid on them to give them great homes.
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Yes
Those sort of “commenters” don’t understand that if the horses don’t go through the legal process (lien, auction, etc.), the owner can come back and try to claim them at some point in the future. That happened to a friend of mine - the owner showed up 9 months later when no one was at the farm and loaded up her horse and off they went. This was after my friend had spent a bunch of $$$ getting the horse sound again. She never got repaid for the 9 months of back board, nor for the vet and farrier bills. LE wouldn’t help because she didn’t hold legal ownership of the horse therefore it wasn’t “stolen” and she was told she would have to pursue the matter in civil court. She was out over $10,000 but didn’t do anything further because she knew the owner was a low-income drifter without a solid work history or assets worth going after.
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Horrible.
I knew somebody who ran a retirement farm. One of the owners stopped paying the board bill on her horse for nearly a year. And when the farm owner finally got a hold of her, the horse owner said, “Oh, you can just keep him or you can put him down. Whatever you want.”
And the farm owner said, “That’s fine, but you still owe me the money for the board bill and his other expenses for the last 11 months.” I think she eventually had to take the person to small claims court.
And in the meantime the horse owner was still riding and showing her other horses that were not retired. It’s not that she did not have the money, by a long shot.
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Sadly, I don’t have sympathy for delinquent owners.
We’ve been in the situation where people lied about their financial ability to keep horses ( they never had the money), had their situation change, but failed to work with us ( we would have worked with them) bragged about how much money they have, but were slow pay ( we have to pay our bills on time, so so do you)
If you can’t afford where you have the horses, be honest with the BO and trainer, and get out of there and into a situation that you can afford, rather than sticking others with the bills
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If I could afford to purchase the 3 horses that are up for auction, transport them to my state and then afford upkeep on them, I wouldn’t hesitate to pay the minimum of 11k or over. As other posters have said, the minimum bid is what is owed to Maplewood. Per the comments, the 13 yr old is an up to 1m jumper and a nice horse to ride (the former owner of the horse commented on the post). The other two had been used for lessons until they retired a year ago. If I could swing it, I’d talk to my trainers about buying/leasing the older horses to use the older two as lesson horses (if they were able to be used after a year off, even for beginner, low impact lessons). And I’d love to have the 1m jumper as my own ride, or to partially lease. Like I mentioned earlier in my post, financially that isn’t feasible for me, but I think these 3 horses could be very useful for the right person/people.
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Money aside, I will never understand the moral code that enables such callous disregard for and devaluation of life, especially the life of a being who once gave you everything he had.
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The part that makes it even worse, if that’s possible, is that the horse owner used to always rave about how much she loved that horse, and he was so fabulous and wonderful and fantastic, her horse of a lifetime, yada, yada.
But once he was no longer able to show, apparently she forgot about all of that.
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I am always amazed by people who think trainers farms and vets should be charity wards because they love animals.
This barn owner / trainer are due their earned fees. I bet retirement farms run in to this a lot and I would think they spell out the consequences in their contracts
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I’ll bet it’s even worse for retirement farms since by definition, those horses usually do not have much value on the open market if they need to be sold to settle the board bill.
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I don’t know about NV law, but in California the barn owner can auction the horses after a period of time with the minimum bid being the amount owed. I think that anything over that maybe has to go to the owner. I also think that the BO gets the horses if the minimum isn’t reached, but they have to go through the process. Some BO’s will have you sign something that enables them to sell the horses sooner or with less due process if you don’t pay.
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Very similar in MD but the part I found amusing is that a notice has to be posted on the courthouse door or something…like it’s the 1800’s. Notice is necessary to the owner.
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I actually wondered about that part. Is Facebook the new courthouse door?
Facebook is how you make sure your network/local folks who know these horses and would want to buy them are aware of the sale. You have to also follow the local statute’s requirements for notice.
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most often that will be a specific newspaper that has been declared newspaper of public record for the county/city which may also be linked to a website
here www.texaspublicnotices.com is a public service made possible by the newspapers of Texas at no additional cost to taxpayers. The Texas Legislature passed SB-943 in 2023 to expand transparency of public notices.
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Does anyone know what was the outcome of this auction?
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