The craigslist ads in my part of Arizona are often troubling. Like this one:
“10 yr old Appoloosa, loads and ties, picks up her feet. She needs an experienced rider, has a stiff neck so she needs work on that, needs miles.”
Why does this AppOloosa have a “stiff neck”? Injury? Neuro issues? Tetanus? I mean, seriously, why or how did this become a noteworthy fault?
And have you ever noticed how many horses are listed as 10 years old? It’s the go-to age for unregistered horses.
How are all of these horses “the sweetest horse I’ve ever met”? I swear I saw like a dozen ads in a row with that phrase.
Guess what? About 6 months ago I bought a cute little tobiano mare on kind of a whim and her dreamhorse ad said “she is the sweetest horse I’ve ever known in my life.” I’m not kidding! 
Of course I had to spend the next 90 days getting her broke and teaching her that no, she could not exit the arena whenever she pleased but yeah, in the crossties and on the ground she was really sweet. 
Lol! Well I’m glad yours turned out to be sweet! At least sometimes
All horses are quiet and sweet.
Until the 1/10,000 of a second they are not.
Weird ads are one thing. What bothers me, though, are the blatantly false ones.
For example: I know someone who owns a very large, attractive, Thoroughbred gelding. She got him off the track as a 3 year old and has had him for 6 or 7 years. In that time, she has accomplished exactly nothing with this horse because he is just plain DANGEROUS both on the ground and under saddle. Oh, and he’s also chronically lame. So how does his sale ad read? “Beautiful mover, very personable, ready for a talented junior to finish off…” Yeah. No. She’s going to get someone killed. 
Well, from the standpoint he might literally finish off a junior who gets on him…
People honestly don’t care as long as they can pass their problems off to someone else. I had a young horse that was mildly neuro and was going to euthanize. Had a friend of a friend beg me to send him to her. I did with the understanding that he was only to come back to me if it did not work out. Everything went well for a year or so and she would update me every few months. Then out of the blue a woman called me telling me she had bought him off Dreamhorse and the person had told her he had some minor muscle issues that could be improved with work. Luckily i had kept him up on my website so she was able to find me. Someone could have gotten really hurt by him. And he could have ended up in a bad place.
OTTB mare - “She only raced 2 times so very little wear and tear on her.” Posts a picture of her pedigree and stats from equineline.com which show 18 starts.
I wonder if they did something stupid like looked her up on PedigreeQuery.com which tends to not be accurate and it showed 2 races. But decided to link equiline in the sales ad but never bothered to read the information there to notice that she actually raced 18 times.
I could see me doing something stupid like that.
I just recently googled the JC name of a *supposedly track trained but unraced *supposedly 4 year old OTTB that my trainer restarted and sold for someone else who owned him, I was just randomly thinking about him and trying to remember his breeding… he is 11 and raced like over 60 times and actually earned a lot on the track 
he’s in his new home now though! I hope it was just a matter of no one ever actually googling his name even though it’s really easy to do lmao.
They have a fast metabolism, because they are bread for performance.
The owner of the horse I’m now leasing said she bought him after he came off the track and she claimed she’d “had him restarted for a year and he was jumping courses, and then he sat for a year”.
I looked up his tattoos - his last race was 14 months prior.
These unraced-but-raced OTTBs remind me of a teenaged black and white Paint I bought a few years ago. I was told he had been a “husband horse” and was only used for plodding down the trails. He was big with fancy bloodlines-- yet really cheap-- so I figured there was something sketchy in his background. When I tried him I tinkered with him for a while and, sure enough, discovered he had some training. He did nice lateral movements and lovely flying changes. The seller seemed shocked that the horse had that much training because: Plodding Husband Horse.
Got him home with an agreement that my vet could do a PPE the next day and I could haul him back for a refund if he didn’t pass.
Surprise! My vet opened up a draining fistula from where the poor horse had been gelded. Then she pulled out wads of old gauze! She told me that clearly he had been a stallion until fairly recently.
I called the seller and told her what my vet found. The seller told me, “Oh, I had him gelded when I moved to this new barn because they don’t allow stallions. But don’t worry. He’s never been bred.”
Called APHA and guess what? He had over a dozen registered foals!
I guess I’m a sucker for a pretty horse that needs some lovin’. The seller outright lied about the horse being a stud. Plus the poor horse had an infection from being butchered when he was gelded, a goopy eye and a bad case of rain rot. Yet I bought him anyway.
Sounds like he got lucky with his new home. But we are dying to know - was he a good “husband horse” as advertised? 
So here is a weird thing I encountered. Perusing FB, in response to an ISO ad, someone posted a link to a website with horses for sale. The location was CA. The site had a TON of horses listed. Everything from western pleasure to dressage to hunter/jumper. Weird to have that many and that much variety. Backgrounds in the pictures made it obvious it wasn’t the same location and it was not the same riders.
Then I saw a background that looked familiar. I clicked on the link for more information on the horse, and the pictures and wording of the ad (which was lengthy and detailed) had been copied from a site that I check often. The only thing they did was change the horse’s name. Now, why would someone do that? Are they just counting on people buying a horse sight unseen? Prices on all the horses were upper 4 figures whereas the legitmate seller had sole the horse for lower 5’s.
That was a couple weeks ago. The site no longer exists and a Google search came up with this:
https://www.complaintsbureau.org/bakersfield-ranch/
My husband adored him but he didn’t ride him much. I could rode the horse all over town and even hopped over low jumps. Unfortunately, after I’d had him for a little over a year he suddenly went lame.
On the vet work-up we discovered he had suffered some kind of injury and/or had surgery on his fetlock/pastern area. There were little triangular artifacts that made a distinct line on the xrays. They looked like the tips of surgical clips (?) and once we shaved that leg we could see a long, faint scar. I called the seller and quelle surprise, she knew nothing. My vet loved the horse, so I gave him to her because she could use him to cruise around town on the weekends at a walk.
So he went from a Husband Horse to a Vet Horse… with a little detour along the way. 
Again, he was a very lucky horse!
If you’re a sucker, than so am I. Because I would’ve done the same!
Eta: @Event_Horse, yup. That’s exactly what they’re doing. I’ve seen it sometimes with ads for horses in Eastern Europe at unbelievably low prices. I’ve traveled in Eastern Europe fairly extensively. I look at the background in a lot of the photos in these ads, and it’s apparent that they weren’t taken in the country the sellers claim. I get that people can & do travel to shows. But that’s not what’s going on in these pics. There’s enough differences between the topography of Croatia versus the Netherlands that I can tell the photo wasn’t taken at their home farm in the former as they allege.
Glad to read that the site is no longer up. Maybe that complaint worked.
That could be the latest scam on unsuspecting horse buyers: create sales ads for horses using pics you copy and paste from various sites. Then, when you get inquiries, be elusive yet ask for money transfers to buy the horse before someone else snaps it up.
@TheDBYC Good eye on the backgrounds and scenery! 
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