The buyer's degradation
Here we want to talk about the process every horse owner has to go through in life — buying and selling horses.
We have been breeding, producing training and ..... yes - selling sport horses not only for many years, but decades now.We have been at both ends of the stick. We bought horses privately, from big places and small, through auctions, even through live sales in UK some years ago, where you get cobs and hunters and occasional race horse mixed with sheep.
What has changed?
We will tell what we see and quite possibly you will recognise something.
Just yesterday, just one single day, about 20 people contacted us about buying a horse. Almost every conversation followed the same exhausting and irrational pattern and ended nowhere. This is no longer an exception.
It has become the norm. On one side, there is the buyer with endless questions, endless inspections, endless suspicion:
• "Why is it expensive?"
• "Why is it cheap?"
• "Why did the horse compete there?"
• "Why did it not compete somewhere else?"
• "Is it healthy?"
• "Why are you selling it?"
And so on for hours. When all the questions were patiently answered, the person disappears without thank you or offers a fraction of the price.
Which is equally annoying. Of course, we do not expect everyone who asks to buy the horse. But we also remember the times when people conducted themselves with more dignity. In less anonymous, less internet times, people knew that how they behave today will impact relations in the future. If you are a pain with people today, most likely there will be less opportunities for you tomorrow. Not nowadays, everyone is free to message everyone with no consequences.
Earlier people who were buying horses were mostly horsey people themselves. Most of them were likely to be sellers at some point also. They respected the seller as their equal. They intuitively sensed what is ok and what is not. Where are the politeness and common-sense lines not to cross. Just think about it this way. Before you were always shopping in your local area. No one would travel hundreds of miles to try out a horse. Or even fly to another country — to combine touristic and equestrian interests. You did not want to annoy people you know. You did not want to get a reputation as a difficult person to deal with.
Nowadays there are no such limitations. It is not a problem to arrange a whole travel adventure to try out a horse. And to see the process as checking out another car model. Treating all involved, including the horse, as sales managers who are just happy to entertain you in the hope to get some money because at the end it really is their job.
It seems today horses are viewed by buyers as any other kind of goods on the market. Like a car, for example. If you are choosing yourself a car, you go to the showroom. If it is an expensive brand — they bring you champagne and Swiss chocolates in the process. You test-drive one model, another model. Then you go away without any obligation whatsoever. To “have a thought about it”.
Do you see the problem?
People who are probably never selling horses themselves, who got some money for this fun, not necessarily a large sum. They are like shopping for a new car, not a living soul. And are doing it in a professional showroom, not with people have personal relations with the “sale object”. And another complete piece of nonsense is this idea that if a person bought a horse and paid money for it, then automatically they will care for it properly, understand how to manage it, understand what to do with it, and behave responsibly toward it. Personally with this particular creature and its demands.
That is absolute nonsense. Money mostly gives people another illusion that now they have the right to demand, check, try, question, pressure, negotiate, destroy everyone’s brains, and then still leave because "they are not sure." The whole crowd believes that the buyer is always right.
They see the picture. They want the result. They ask whether it can be bought. But they can not complete anything. Like zombies. The horse buyer world has degraded so badly and become so full of internet idiots, irresponsible people, lunatics, people who understand nothing, have no real connection to horses, or have simply lost touch with reality completely, that it becomes harder and harder to meet with those rare cases where you are dealing with a normal person.
A person who genuinely wants the horse. A person who understands what and why they are doing. Meeting normal people in this zombie horse-buying apocalypse becomes really rare. So a completely natural reaction appears: to stop dealing with it altogether. And instead to create a completely different approach to the question.
A different approach to how horses can move between people. What should happen to a horse when it is time for it to continue its life with somebody else. The entire seller-horse-buyer system is rapidly degrading.
It has not completely collapsed yet. But it is clearly moving in that direction. And as far as we are concerned, we are already out of it.
Here we want to talk about the process every horse owner has to go through in life — buying and selling horses.
We have been breeding, producing training and ..... yes - selling sport horses not only for many years, but decades now.We have been at both ends of the stick. We bought horses privately, from big places and small, through auctions, even through live sales in UK some years ago, where you get cobs and hunters and occasional race horse mixed with sheep.
What has changed?
We will tell what we see and quite possibly you will recognise something.
Just yesterday, just one single day, about 20 people contacted us about buying a horse. Almost every conversation followed the same exhausting and irrational pattern and ended nowhere. This is no longer an exception.
It has become the norm. On one side, there is the buyer with endless questions, endless inspections, endless suspicion:
• "Why is it expensive?"
• "Why is it cheap?"
• "Why did the horse compete there?"
• "Why did it not compete somewhere else?"
• "Is it healthy?"
• "Why are you selling it?"
And so on for hours. When all the questions were patiently answered, the person disappears without thank you or offers a fraction of the price.
Which is equally annoying. Of course, we do not expect everyone who asks to buy the horse. But we also remember the times when people conducted themselves with more dignity. In less anonymous, less internet times, people knew that how they behave today will impact relations in the future. If you are a pain with people today, most likely there will be less opportunities for you tomorrow. Not nowadays, everyone is free to message everyone with no consequences.
Earlier people who were buying horses were mostly horsey people themselves. Most of them were likely to be sellers at some point also. They respected the seller as their equal. They intuitively sensed what is ok and what is not. Where are the politeness and common-sense lines not to cross. Just think about it this way. Before you were always shopping in your local area. No one would travel hundreds of miles to try out a horse. Or even fly to another country — to combine touristic and equestrian interests. You did not want to annoy people you know. You did not want to get a reputation as a difficult person to deal with.
Nowadays there are no such limitations. It is not a problem to arrange a whole travel adventure to try out a horse. And to see the process as checking out another car model. Treating all involved, including the horse, as sales managers who are just happy to entertain you in the hope to get some money because at the end it really is their job.
It seems today horses are viewed by buyers as any other kind of goods on the market. Like a car, for example. If you are choosing yourself a car, you go to the showroom. If it is an expensive brand — they bring you champagne and Swiss chocolates in the process. You test-drive one model, another model. Then you go away without any obligation whatsoever. To “have a thought about it”.
Do you see the problem?
People who are probably never selling horses themselves, who got some money for this fun, not necessarily a large sum. They are like shopping for a new car, not a living soul. And are doing it in a professional showroom, not with people have personal relations with the “sale object”. And another complete piece of nonsense is this idea that if a person bought a horse and paid money for it, then automatically they will care for it properly, understand how to manage it, understand what to do with it, and behave responsibly toward it. Personally with this particular creature and its demands.
That is absolute nonsense. Money mostly gives people another illusion that now they have the right to demand, check, try, question, pressure, negotiate, destroy everyone’s brains, and then still leave because "they are not sure." The whole crowd believes that the buyer is always right.
They see the picture. They want the result. They ask whether it can be bought. But they can not complete anything. Like zombies. The horse buyer world has degraded so badly and become so full of internet idiots, irresponsible people, lunatics, people who understand nothing, have no real connection to horses, or have simply lost touch with reality completely, that it becomes harder and harder to meet with those rare cases where you are dealing with a normal person.
A person who genuinely wants the horse. A person who understands what and why they are doing. Meeting normal people in this zombie horse-buying apocalypse becomes really rare. So a completely natural reaction appears: to stop dealing with it altogether. And instead to create a completely different approach to the question.
A different approach to how horses can move between people. What should happen to a horse when it is time for it to continue its life with somebody else. The entire seller-horse-buyer system is rapidly degrading.
It has not completely collapsed yet. But it is clearly moving in that direction. And as far as we are concerned, we are already out of it.