Pet peeve mini-rant: horse sales

Also, “loves peppermints.”

Yeah, that definitely makes him a “unicorn.”

:roll_eyes:

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most of “those” horse ads really need to in a separate category of Sucker Needed

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I also really do not like the ads written from the horse’s POV. Seriously this isn’t a cutesy Instagram account, it’s a sale ad!

I’d actually like WAY less text in an ad in favor of a good video and conformation pics. I don’t care what the horse’s favorite treats are or that it “loves to snuggle”. I want to know if it’s built for the job you’re advertising it for!

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With the high prices horses are going for, I see retirees being sold for $1,000 to $2,000. The horses all look the same. Usually scruffy, despite it being summer (likely Cushings), poor muscling, quiet-looking, trusting, souls with no clue that they’re about to lose the home that they have served so well for so long. Breaks my heart. I pray for soft landings for them all.

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In those cases, I wish the owners would just put them down.

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I’m seeing so many of these and they break my heart too.

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I saw 4 ads just today in my area for older beasts that need a soft place. :flushed:

One of them purchased a new horse and can’t afford board for two.

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And then there is me: I moved my 30+ year old retiree halfway across the country so I could keep him local to me after I moved. Of course I had to opt for the box stall on an air ride semi. The cool part was that my husband didn’t question it, even though he knew how much I paid to do this.

Rebecca

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This is why we married them, Rebecca.

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I don’t understand the now used “unicorn” description. I never thought of a unicorn as attractive, kind or anything other than maybe a prehistoric connection to a rhino?
:face_with_raised_eyebrow:

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I’ve always interpreted it to mean that the person is looking for what is nearly impossible to find: something sound, cheap, sane, well-trained, can take a joke, and in an ideal age range with plenty of years ahead of it.

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Yup. I refer to DD16’s jumper as her sparkly magical Alicorn - aka a winged unicorn.


Back when I kept our crew at home, an acquaintance would often hit me up on behalf of her friends, trying to give away some poor horse in its 20s, that had carried their children through and over everything with white kid gloves, only to be cast away in favor of new, younger model. It drove me bat sh-t, f—ing insane. Not at her, mind you. She cared enough to pick up the phone, even though they weren’t her horses, and with the idea that I might enjoy them as a dressage rider. No, it’s the idiot owners that piss me off. :face_with_symbols_over_mouth:

I’ll put it this way: A visitor to Mount Vernon marveled at seeing the aged Nelson and Blue ensconced in the barn, enjoying a comfortable retirement of nothing much other than eating and sleeping, in an era when such a thing was uncommon no matter how much money one had. Washington remarked that the two horses had borne him safely through hell and back & owed him nothing. Indeed, it was he that owed them everything and then some. If Washington could do that 275 years ago…

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Then there’s the guy I know that sold his good horse that had carried his sorry butt all over the mountains for years, to a feed lot so he could “get a few bucks out of him.” True story.

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