In the fall of 2017 we decided to add our first horse to our family. I had grown up with horses, but like so many people, after college I moved away for a job and drifted away from horses even though they have always been my passion. We were excited for our new journey, we were going to have a horse. I thought about trail rides and fond memories of my childhood horses. I was not prepared for how much the horse industry had changed while I was away. As a child, I looked forward to getting the newspaper so that I could read the classified ads. There were always so many horses listed! I would read every ad and occasionally we would go look at one of the horses listed. While we didn’t buy all the horses we looked at, we found many horses this way.
It didn’t take long to go from the excitement of we are getting a horse, to how do you find a good reliable family horse? Even though I had grown up around horses, I had been away from it for so long that I had lost my confidence and didn’t have any trusted contacts to help. Feeling a little lost on how to find our family horse, we bought books, spent hours researching on the internet and joined several facebook groups as that seemed to be the way people were buying/selling horses. I was happy to finally find the new “classified ads”. I spent hours daily reading the ads on facebook. I was overwhelmed. Most ads consisted of some information about the horse, a picture or video and sometimes their location, and lots of killpen horses looking to be rescued. Since facebook doesn’t technically allow selling of animals, few ads had prices. How were we suppose to find a horse in our budget without knowing the price? So we started messaging on ads. I can’t tell you how many horses I reached out about only to find out they had already sold. Apparently its now common to buy horses over the internet based on a video or picture. We found a few horses that we liked, but they were either to far away, out of our budget, or sold the day we had an appointment to try them out.
In the end it all worked out though. We purchased our first horse November 2017 and picked her up the day before Thanksgiving. Looking back, I’m not sure if we bought her because she was a good fit, or because she happened to be available, in our budget and fairly close to our location. She was not pretty in her winter coat, had horrible feet that needed a lot of work, was covered in lice and would bite you if you she didn’t want to do something.
While we still have so much to learn, we have came a long way. I thank God every day for the horse we probably should have passed on, as she has taught us so much. We have made some wonderful contacts and friends on our journey and have added 4 more horses to our herd.
