May Horse Auction

This past Friday my husband and I went to our second horse auction in our town. Summersville has a horse auction every first Friday of the month. We go for the good deals on tack and to look at horse prospects. Everyone we talk to has an opinion about buying a horse at auction. You run the risk of buying another persons problems. But sometimes you can find a horse worth saving for a good price if you have to time to rehabilitate and train. It is so hard to be objective when you see a horse in pain or wounded at these events.

Rideable horses have saddles and are ridden in the ring of the auction. Unrideable, green horses, or wild ones do not have any tack on. They are set free in a pen with other unrideables and auctioned off individually or as a whole lot. Most auction houses only make money selling the tack. The horses cost money to feed and transport and they lose money. Sometimes a horse owner sells the horse as unrideable, when the horse IS rideable, just has some hoof issues. And that was the case with a tall dapple gelding I saw there. He had a bad farrier and was suffering from short heels. The horse was 7 years old and was a trained trail horse. He was scared to be in a pen with unfamiliar horses. But I could see he was a good prospect for saving. It was frustrating I was not set up to buy him and take him home. I learned the info about this gelding after the auction from a neighbor to the horse owner. The gelding owner did not want to pay for the treatment the bad hooves.

The black pregant mare was a fox trotter being sold as rideable. She was not shod and the gravel was hurting her short feet. The paint threw a shoe before the auction and was getting it worked on.

We learned that in the fall horse prices drop as people sell their before winter. They do not want to have to feed the horse all winter. In the spring horse prices go up because everyone wants to go trail riding and grass is plentiful. Horses seem to become disposable if they begin to cost money.