Why does no one question horse prices?

[self_made_hunter_jumper]

Totally fair, thought many of the kings of the sport couldn’t do what they do without the labor (and silence) of illegal immigrants.

I realize I just opened up a whole other can of worms, so please, let the games begin…

[eightpondfarm]

well, i think i paid about 500 for one of my ‘rescues’, maybe it was $900. Don’t remember actually. Basically, nothing! Was told i could get 50k for him now.
I have a lot of horses and he is not one of my favorite horses, but i won’t sell him either. He is happy, i ride him fairly often and i think he’ll go into western dressage one day if i can screw up my courage.
I think it’s ridiculous the price of many things on earth. But, I don’t begrudge breeders/trainers their due. But i’m not one of their buyers either. I like taking a horse with potential and polishing him/her into lovely. But then again, i like taking a broken, sad, old horse and giving her/him green pastures for the rest of her/his life too. I just like horses and have zero desire to turn them into money. I feel sorry for horses that end up getting turned over a few times in their life…i really do. So i guess that kinda goes with this thread. I don’t think of a horse in terms of money. I think of a horse as a friend.

[atr]

(Pokes head in from dressageworld) I kind of resent the implication here that all ammies are rubes that just fell off the turnip truck, ripe for the fleecing.

Some of us are actually quite sophisticated and understand the laws of supply and demand.

[Scribbler]

@beowulf

This thread is starting to devolve into conspiracy theories, but for the sake of those who want to know what it’s like producing a horse in our current market, I’ll put my cost[s] to produce my 5 y/o WB below.

Her sire’s stud fee was $1600. Her breeder’s foals sell in utero for $20-50k. She was worth five figures before I sat on her back.
In feed alone, she’s cost over $12,000 in the last five years. ($200/mo)
I keep my horses at home so don’t have to pay board, but if I did, five years of board in my area would be $90,000 () if I paid $1500/mo.
Her farrier costs have been $3,000 (she is barefoot) for the last five years. ($50/mo)

A segue for a moment about the challenges of producing a young horse: here in the states, there is a dearth of quality sport-horse starters. There are tons of ambitious teens/twenty year olds that will ride anything, and tons of brilliant trainers who will train an already started horse, but very few experienced young horse trainers will agree to climb aboard that horse’s first time being ridden. Someone out there has to convert that unbroke baby who doesn’t even know how to have its feet picked into a riding horse. That takes months of daily work, and years of regular riding, training, and showing. These babies have to be taught to be handled, be good citizens for routine things like grooming, clipping, bathing, load in a trailer, stand for the farrier. They need to be taught to stand at the mounting block, to walk, trot, canter. To jump things they are pointed at. To ignore stimuli like plastic bags, loudspeakers, people running, bicycles. To concentrate on their job. To go new places confidently, step in any ring and be rideable, to be okay alone or in a group, to trail ride on the buckle, to look to their rider for support when they are nervous or unsure…

Trust me that this process does not happen overnight.

If you were to pay me to train this horse regularly, and I valued my time at $75 a 45m session (which I do), starting from the time she was 3 to now and accounting for only working her half the year, you’d owe me $13,200 per year in training fees. She’s had almost 3 years of training ($39,600). If you(g) put her up for training board with me instead of paying per training session, and I charged the going rate for training board in my area which is $1700, that’s $20,4000 a year and $61,200 for the last three years.

If I want this mare to have a resume, I’m going to have to spend thousands of dollars a year in show fees. A recognized event in my area is $275 for entry fees, $50 for stabling, ~$200 in lodging, and $100 in fuel. If we assume that each show will cost me $625 (which is CHEAP by showing standards), and you want to put 10 shows under her belt from spring to fall (about 1 show every 3.5 weeks), that’s $6,250 in show fees. This number is the biggest variable - some years you do two shows, some years you are almost doing back to back.

These are all costs associated with production. If you add my actual costs together – that’s everything from how much she was as a weanling to how much mileage and exposure I’ve put into her the last five years, you get over $71,000. That amount would be doubled if I boarded. The market starts to make sense when you look at prices in a cost-of-production sense.

If I sold this filly (she is never for sale), I deserve to make money. My product is valuable, and as a young horse rider/trainer, I know exactly what has gone into this horse. I put improvements into this product. I made her rideable. I made her handleable. I gave her exposure. I taught her how to bathe, clip, pony off of another horse, pick up her feet, jump, load in the trailer and travel well. The list goes on - these are improvements I gave this product and I – and other trainers – deserve to be fairly compensated. Especially when you consider that young horse riders are not common, and the amount of people producing horses per year is shrinking as more and more riders are priced out or go to easier, more profitable avenues like training adult horses or instructing adult clients.

Yes.

A good decade ago, a low level OTTB fellow brought two sweet long yearlings off a pasture into the stalls next to me to clean them up for the fall sales. He said that it cost at least $35,000 to get to the point where you knew if you even had a horse that could race. I was sad for him after he left to see his horses went at the TB sale for $1500 each to chuck wagon homes in Alberta.

That’s why OTTB are the deal of the century when they are offloaded by their trainers. You don’t pay anything near the cost of producing them. Ditto feral horses and mustangs.

If you paid every step of the way to make a sport horse and then calculate training at $1000 a month, you are going to reach $50,000 as a baseline for a quality horse soon enough.

Does this price me out of buying a made horse in the prime of life? Yes. Does that bother me? No.

We are in an era where there are more wealthy people and a bigger gap between middling folks and the wealthy. I’m actually doing OK. But there’s a whole lot I’m priced out of and I don’t care. Because the world simply is not fair economically. And when you are priced out of something it’s simple (well, complex! ) market forces, not someone trying to rip you off.

Obviously we’ve all had moments of thinking “OMG you paid THAT for that horse?? What were you thinking?” But if prices are up overall it’s market forces not an individual trainer profiteering with naieve clients.

Also shady or incompetent sales, training, horse management absolutely takes place at the very low levels too. It’s not like everyone riding a homemade OTTB or Appendix is a virtuous honest striving upright horse person and everyone on a high dollar made WB in a training program is a fool with a syringe.

Anyhow I hang out at the low end of nice horses, where people have an eye for a horse but are not willing to drop much cash. My coach has two nice big WB geldings in her lesson program that were signed over to her for $1 each after their previous owners decided they were washed up. Last recorded sales price for each was in the $50k to $60k range ten plus years ago.

So I get to see lots of OTTB and OTSB, and lots of late started and fallen through the cracks and needs restart horses, most pedigreed, QH, Morgans, Arabs, Iberians, WBs, etc. They usually turn into nice enough riding horses. But my observation over the past 15 years since I returned to riding is that the late start odd ball horses very rarely develop a coherent competitive skill set in a time frame before they start to get actually old. There is too much problem solving to do, and the riders (including me) end up learning valuable stuff about groundwork etc and end up drifting away from a competition framework.

I have moments of thinking what a treat it would be to have a horse from my breed of choice that was a safe sane 5 or 6 year old going w t c with no dangerous behaviors. Not even a made horse, just one that I could start gently schooling. But honestly I know that would have to cost at least $30,000 if I was going to buy from a really responsible person who I wanted to reward fairly for their talent effort and investment. I could pay that but I can’t. I just can’t. And that’s a choice.

The other thing about high dollar competition horses is that most average ammies do not do well in higher level competition if they are not also in a barn with a focused training program. You don’t spend $100,000 on a hunter and then keep it at our self board club and haul out alone with your F150 and bumper pull (the Pony Club kids here and their horsey moms do that and thrive, but it’s a different ethos, very DIY. Which I love to see).

Anyhow if you buy a $50,000 or $100,000 horse because GOALS then you also need to upgrade to a training barn that’s way more expensive.

[trubandloki]

@trubandloki

@self_made_hunter_jumper

It’s the people who don’t have to rely on this industry for money that have the power to push for change. It’s unfortunate you can’t see that.

Please… tell us what you think the answer is. What do you want people to do to solve this problem as you see it?

@self_made_hunter_jumper, please answer my question that I have quoted here for you. You must have missed it when I posted it above.

[BigPaintHorse]

@self_made_hunter_jumper

Doing it repeatedly feels like a systemic problem that could reasonably be a part of the sharp increases in horse prices.

Do you feel like if I buy cars and fix them up and repeatedly sell them for a profit a systemic problem?

[lenapesadie]

@self_made_hunter_jumper

Totally fair, thought many of the kings of the sport couldn’t do what they do without the labor (and silence) of illegal immigrants.

I realize I just opened up a whole other can of worms, so please, let the games begin

yawns

I dunno what rock you’ve been living under, but working conditions for grooms has been a hot topic for a while now. Between that and the general labor conditions in the US, labor costs for grooms (documented or not) have increased substantially. Plot twist! That drives horse prices even higher!

[self_made_hunter_jumper]

[self_made_hunter_jumper]

Cars have VIN numbers and an entirely traceable supply chain.

[trubandloki]

@self_made_hunter_jumper

Cars have VIN numbers and an entirely traceable supply chain.

In case you did not know, the N in VIN = number so saying VIN numbers is like saying vehicle identification number numbers.

[lenapesadie]

Young riders get on young horses every day. WBs, OTTBs, every kind of horse.

I need more guac over here

[Jealoushe]

@self_made_hunter_jumper

but the higher up the levels you get, the less of them there seem to be.

Funny, I have found the exact opposite. As someone else pointed out to you, perhaps its the company you keep that is the issue and not the sport.

@self_made_hunter_jumper

Totally fair, thought many of the kings of the sport couldn’t do what they do without the labor (and silence) of illegal immigrants.

We don’t have those in Canada, and yet the sport is alive and well.

@self_made_hunter_jumper

There’s not a lot of young riders willing to get on Warmbloods because too many of them have screws loose. My personal opinion is that breeders focused so much on performance, they forgot about intelligence and temperament, which led to so many tragedies for ambitious young riders

And with this comment you have just outed how uneducated you are on the topic.

[DawgLady]

I did major in Economics. And I agree with you, clanter.

Drawing a similarity to gas here makes no sense. That is a personal expense.

Horses are a business to sellers. Every input cost is an investment in the animal’s value. If a seller cannot sell horses at a profit (at a margin over and above all variable and fixed costs), they will leave the market. Simple as that.

Right now, the cost to produce a competitive amateur or junior hunter is easily in the mid-five figures if not more. We cannot expect these people to operate at a loss, because they won’t. They’ll go find another way to make a living.

I argue there is no “unexplainable price explosion.” I actually think what we are experiencing is a correction. It may be unpalatable to some, but that doesn’t change the truth of it.

[Jealoushe]

@self_made_hunter_jumper

I just saw a horse come in for a lesson not too long ago that was bought sight unseen from am auction. She paid a LOT of money to import him. He was beautiful, super athletic, and she was told he was “green broke”. I watched the horse get pointed at a crossrail and rear/spin/crow hop away. That horse was not green broke - someone really traumatized it and then sent it to auction so it got picked up by an uninformed amateur.

LOL

My broke horse has done that in the spring when excited. What level of skill/riding are you OP? Whats your show results history?

Also, why do you care if others buy horses they can’t ride?

[McGurk]

Weird question:

How would the money laundering thing even work?

Here’s my (admitted limited) knowledge of money laundering: You have an illegal business that generates cash that you need to funnel through a legitmate business. You find or buy a legitimate business that deals primarily in cash: a food truck, a juice bar, a nail salon, car wash or a casino. If the food truck normally does a grand in business a day, you put another grand of your illegally gotten money in the food truck till, report it and pay taxes on it, and voila! Legitimate income.

How would this work on horse sales? I have a nice, modest, local show hunter worth $50k. I sell it for $50K, but report that I sold it for $150K in order to launder an ill gotten $100K? That doesn’t work. First of all, it’s not cash, so it’s all traceable. Second of all, banking regulations require banks to report deposits in excess of $10K, so that big deposit would trigger lots of questions, even if broken up into lots of little deposits. Third, the buyer got a 50K horse for 50K - how does that contribute to the inflation of horse prices? Nobody but the seller is going to know he reported the sale as $150K.

Maybe I’m not criminally minded enough, but I just don’t see how it works. I get the taco truck/nail salon/car wash method, but even then you have to be careful that the cash reported is a reasonable amount of income for the size of the business. A casino is probably a better bet for laundering large amounts of cash, because it would be hard for an outside observer to determine exactly how much cash was generated legitimately by gaming and how much was being laundered.

[Jealoushe]

@self_made_hunter_jumper

Because that horse is dangerous and it’s going to be some twenty-something that ends up dead or paralyzed. That’s why. Your lack of empathy for a sport with life and death consequences says a lot.

You made this up in your mind over seeing a horse spin and scoot. You have no idea if the horse is dangerous or what the person who bought it wants to do with it. Or are you scared someone might snap it up cheap and beat you in the ring?

I realize now you don’t have a lot of experience outsite your very tiny bubble so I will try and be easier on you.

Plenty of ammies and teenagers can take a horse others can not ride and turn them into solid citizens. You don’t know anything about these situations but jump to the most extreme that someone could get killed.

If you are THAT worried then contact the auction house. Otherwise, MYOEB

For someone who cries about being attacked, you make comments to me like “says a lot”

Every post you make is “saying a lot” about you.

[Jealoushe]

@self_made_hunter_jumper

Canada is a totally different world than America. Pretty sure your healthcare isn’t tied to your employment - am I right?

Is there any other issue you want to throw in? Trump? Abortion? What else is causing issues in your horse world?

[FjordBCRF]

OP does a lot of projecting.

[self_made_hunter_jumper]

Nope, just that it’s really easy to make good choices when you aren’t choosing between saying employed with heath insurance and being unemployed without health insurance.

[ThreeWishes]

Pit bulls? Global warming ? Q anon? Toss them all in