How Not to Sell Your Horse
The warning to this post is that it’s going to sound snobby, but I feel like when you talk about horse shopping there’s a certain air of unavoidable snobbery that comes up. So go ahead and picture me sipping port before I had out for a brisk winter fox hunt with the royals. While you’re working up that picture in your mind, I’m going to help the general public on some general tips and tricks on how to not sell your horse on craigslist.
Basic Horse Vocabulary
I am in the market for a gelding, see below.
geld·ing
If you are selling a gilding, then I hope you are asking more than $400 for it. 1200 lbs is a lot of gold.
gild·ing
Horses are great at all different things; jumping, trail riding, western pleasure, dressage, barrel racing – even roping cattle! Basketball, however, is not included in this list. Horses are not good at basketball. Please find pictures of your horse doing something else besides attempting to play NCAA team sports.
Horse Expressions
A horse’s ears are the window to their feelings. Actually, the entire horse’s face is pretty expressive in terms of their emotions. To the casual horse shopper, ears up means “Hey I’m a pretty nice horse who wants to be your friend!” Ears back mean, “Move along. I’m old and grumpy and I hate you.”
Take the extra 10 seconds to crinkle a candy wrapper or make a funny noise that will actually point your horse’s ears toward the camera.
If you can’t spell Friesian properly – You don’t have one.
Friesian Horses are black Dutch Draft horses with a high stepping trot, thick feathers, and a long mane and tail. They have been featured in every single period piece movie, Renaissance fairs, and an evening at Medieval Times. They also dance on rainbows and poop magic fairy dust straight from Merlin himself.
That being said, I have no earthly idea what a “Frisian” is (besides some kind of air freshener) and I guess this somewhat cute scruffy little black horse.
If I have a horse, I don’t want you to brake it or tran it
I have a cople of openings for horses to brake and/or tran, $$$ a month includes feed. call or text
No really, that’s a real ad. I guess if you send them your horse, they will teach it to stop extremely well and will dress it up in the opposite horsey gender’s clothing. That last part I can easily do on my own – I won’t tell you how many times I made sweet little Elvis wear more than questionable floral tropical attire… but that’s a different post.
Finally (and I’m dead serious about this one), Don’t sell your sweet old kid safe horse – Just let him retire gracefully
In all seriousness, this is a remarkably sweet old pony. He’s in his (late) 20’s, and is safe and dependable as many pictures in the ad show him being slow and careful with children. This is a pony who has been unbelievably patient and kid to these kids throughout his life. Despite his age, he’s fat and happy in this pictures and well taken care of.
Now for the life of me, I can’t understand how the horse’s (adult) owners can ask $1,000 for this lovely creature no questions asked. There’s not even the normal plea “to good home only” that you see in many ads. I just hope he either doesn’t sell, or he winds up in a nice place where he can live out his days without being passed around like an old sweater.
All jokes aside, that’s the reality for many horses. Owner to owner without any rhyme or reason on their part. Sometimes they’re lucky and end up with someone fabulous (like yours’ truly!) and sometimes they don’t. It’s really, really unfortunate when they don’t. A sweet old guy like this deserves to keep making kids happy, or live in a field growing old and fat until he is no longer comfortable and his owners can gently release him out of this world. If people in a situation like this really can’t keep the horse due to financial reasons, there are other options besides putting him on Craigslist.
Horses are livestock by classification, but pets by sentiment.
3 thoughts on “How Not to Sell Your Horse”
You are not going to believe this… but I know where that old pony went, sort of! I want to tell you it’s a happy ending, but not really. A family bought him and brought him to our farm to board him… the kid was an ok rider but the mom was terrible, and she fell off this gentle old guy so hard that she broke her tailbone and had to be airlifted off the property (I know, right?) She literally just kind of bounced right off, he did nothing wrong. Shortly after that, they stopped showing up and stopped paying board. I’m not sure what happened to him… one day he was just gone, I never asked where he went. But that’s him all right…. I’d recognize that face anywhere.
Whoa! Small world. I hope he landed softly 🙁
Whenever Wiz is being a dick, I always say he should look through craigslist because then he’d realize how lucky and spoiled he is!! He’s basically a one owner boy. Grew up in a field, now me, probably me forever if he plays his cards right, at least until he retires in a field, and I’m a pretty good owner 😉
But that last one makes me sad 🙁
Also I keep meaning to mention this but I LOVE your captcha. It’s hilarious.