Right of first refusal and other ways to keep a SOLD horse "safe"

[Guilherme]

@x-halt-salute

Beautifully clear description!

But is ROFL a variant of ROFR (right of first refusal)? Right of first look? The internet has trained me to see ROFL as “Rolling On (the) Floor Laughing”.

I believe I’m guilty, here, of PPT (Phat Phingered Typing)! Mea culpa.

Sure, you can stalk people on the internet nowadays, but I don’t think that looking into buyers or even truly knowing who you are dealing with is particularly good protection for a horse, either. I’ve seen too many situations where a divorce or an illness or another personal catastrophe has put people who otherwise provide excellent equine homes into a position where they end up dumping horses into not-so-great situations.

A check of a buyer’s bona fides is NOT stalking. It’s research. It can become stalking but it isn’t per se. Ditto for looking for a social media trail. Or looking their house up on Google Earth. Or use of any other legal method of building BI (background investigation) on a potential buyer.

Keep the horse healthy, make it useful through training, vet buyers as well as you can and it has a good shot at a happy life … but far from a guarantee of one.

Life comes without guarantees! Except for the guarantee that it doesn’t have any!!!

I get that this is a complex, real, and difficult issue. But consider that when you bought your horse somebody was taking a chance on YOU. Maybe they checked you out, maybe all they did was ensure your check wouldn’t bounce. They took the same chance on YOU that you must now take on ANOTHER. That’s just the way commerce in the equine world is done.

Unless of course you kill the horse to ensure it will never suffer at the hands of another. That’s being a “barn burner,” IMO.*

G.

*This is an allusion to the story of an old Dutchman who had a barn infested by rats and he solved problem by burning it to the ground.