How to Buy a Horse at a Livestock Auction,
continued ...
Now all you have to do is wait for your horse to enter the
sale ring. You'll notice some buyers standing right at the ringside.
Some may even be with the wranglers inside the ring, poised to
duck behind a solid steel barrier in case a horse lets a hoof
fly. These are the professional buyers. They won't let you inside
the sale ring because you could get killed.
They usually have two ways to sell horses: by the head and
by the hundredweight. Horses with papers and those ridden into
the ring usually go by the head. Those that the sellers think
are good only for the killers go by the hundred pounds of weight.
If the auctioneer says, "sold forty-two dollar,"
he doesn't mean you bought a forty-two-dollar horse. They will
run it over a scale and the weight will light up on a display
above the auctioneer. Multiply the price by the hundreds of pounds
a horse weighs. If it weighs 950 pounds, you will pay $399. If
you have a good sense for horses (or rattled that grain bucket) you
will know which of these are actually probably broke to ride. You can
get astounding bargains this way.
On the other hand, if someone rides a horse into the ring, htis doesn't mean a horse is broke.
Some are so good-natured, tired, petrified, or drugged that they
let someone ride anyhow. You can spot them by their lost looks
and the fact that the rider doesn't do much except sit on top. Or earlier tht morning you might have seen someone cowboying a horse in a sale pen. The horse was bucking sky high, but by the time they get into the ring the horse is too tuckered out to buck any more.
And then -- the auctioneer starts babbling away in Martian, "Wait, wait, what's the price! I can't hear the price!"
you yell. Ask your neighbor for help. By the second or third auction you'll
catch the lingo, the auctioneer will actually start to make sense, and you will wonder how you could ever have been such
a greenhorn.
This is when they run a palomino into the ring that looks like she'll foal
any day -- with twenty other pregnant mares. The
auctioneer says "Tell me if you want to bid on just one."
You raise your hand and he says you don't get to bid on her.
He was just talking to his big buyers. However, he'll say you
can buy them all and send them right back through the auction
and get most of your money back.
Wait! Do the math. The auction gets 5% on all sales. If you
can resell them for the price per pound you paid for that lot,
you will lose 5% times twenty, or 100% of what you paid for the
horse you want. However, the second time around the second highest
bidder might have already gotten enough horses to fill his feedlot.
What if you only get half of what you paid for them? Boing.
Last things. When you go to the front office to pay, ask for
a copy of any Coggins test your horse might have had. It can
come in handy if you want to transport your horse out of state.
Show your papers to one of the wranglers. He'll lead you and
your bucket of water -- yes, don't forget the water -- to your new horse. If you chose a wild horse,
before leaving is a good time to halter break it, which an old-timer
can do in an hour or less. Sometimes those old-timers will help
you, especially if you are a greenhorn of the female persuasion.
It's better to go home with a halter broke horse than one who
doesn't know any better than to run through a barbed wire fence.
The wranglers know how to load almost any horse easily, and
any horse eventually, so that part is a done deal. If your trailer
confines your horse tightly, this could be an easy time to give
its first vaccinations. If you bought a mare or filly, a rhinopneumonitis
shot right now could save a foal from aborting.
When you get home, before anything else, clean the soles of
your boots with bleach. Then unload your new purchase, set it
up in an isolation pen in case it is carrying any communicable diseases, and serve it a smorgasbord of grass hay, water and salt. No alfalfa! No grain! You have to watch out for collic at first, add the rich food slowly.
Finally you can take a seat
and admire your new, and soon to be perfect horse.
###
About the author: Over the years Carolyn Meinel has bought
several dozen horses at livestock auctions, trained, conditioned
and resold them. See more at http://www.horsestories.com.
