Advice Needed: Imported Horses
My daughter and I have begun the search for a 1.30M horse. The search begins with research, and although I’m not the prospective rider–my daughter is–I’ve been doing some of the preliminary investigation.
As I browse horses online, I’m seeing a lot of horses based in Europe and available for import, sometimes through a U.S. based “middle man.” On sites like big eq, I see horses that have been in the United States only a few months–so either they were imported for a particular client and the pairing didn’t work out, or the horses were imported strictly for resale, sometimes at a price double what was being asked in Europe.
After only a few weeks of investigation, my impression is that the market is glutted with horses, and at the same time is overheated in the U.S., with some people trying to “flip” horses for a huge profit. (A 35K horse in Europe is priced at 80K or more here.)
And when I look at some of the conditions inadvertently revealed by some–by no means all–of the European horse videos, the term “puppy mill” springs to mind.
Am I getting the wrong impression? Does anyone have further information about the import market, how it works, and what some pitfalls might be?
Of course there’s absolutely no way we’re buying a horse based on a video alone, but I’m looking for any insights into the state of the market right now. Thanks for any help…
