I have owned horses for over 40 years and during that time I have bought and sold quite a few. It was never easy, and there was always an element of ‘buyer beware’. Although the Internet is ubiquitous now, it wasn’t always so and it is hard to imagine what we did.
When I was about 20 years old, I had been woolclassing out of Broken Hill in outback NSW and I decided to start an ‘outback horse safari’ business. I have always been a bit ahead of my time (or others might say I have always had bad timing), but I like an adventure. Through my woolclassing contacts I found a sheep station near Broken Hill that would allow me to host rides, using the shearers quarters as a base camp. The next challenge was to source some horses and gear, so I headed off to the Gepps Cross horse market in Adelaide some 400 miles away. I bought a dozen horses out of the market, and put them on rail to Broken Hill. When they arrived I just jumped them off the train and herded them across the common for about 10km to the station. Seems a bit daunting now looking back on it but was just what you did back then. Had a great time with Outback Horse Safaris. Some of the horses were great, some not, but that’s another story.
Over the years, we would buy horses sometimes by word of mouth, or on occasions I would be given some. I caught a few wild horses that people wanted off, and even our little block that we have lived on for 30 plus years near Ballarat had half a dozen horses on it that the previous owner didn’t want (or couldn’t catch!). There have always been horse markets and they can and always have been random. I regularly went to Dandenong with my workmate when we had cattle on parks and gardens around Melbourne belonging to the Board of Works. Whilst I enjoyed auctions and still do, horse markets are a bit sad, and I do prefer private sale.
Classified ads ruled. Rural weekly newspapers, daily newspapers (Saturdays livestock columns were huge) and local regional newspapers all had classified ads, with some limited information (because they were really expensive) and a phone number to ring. All of the newspapers including the rural weeklies now play a minimal role in horse sale listings.
Fast forward to today and it is a very different picture. There are still horse markets, but I haven’t been to one in a long time. Perhaps I am getting too old but there seems to be a lot of churn through markets now with the same horses appearing over and over. There is a lot of debate about dog meat horses being saved, which might or might not always be a good thing. Contentious issue though and emotions run high and a discussion might be worthy of another post sometime.
Horse Deals was, and probably still is the premier classified advertising magazine, but I imagine it is struggling. It was always exciting getting the magazine each month and my kids loved it. As horses are listed online as soon as the ad is posted though the magazine is more novelty value now. Other horse classified sites also appeared. Cyberhorse, Horseyard, Tophorse, Horseseller, Horsezone, Horseguide, and even the Trading Post is still going a bit.
And of course I haven’t mentioned the other big two – Gumtree and Facebook. eBay has apolicy which does not allow pets to be sold, but Facebook is more random. Facebook doesn’t allow horses on marketplace but there are hundreds of groups which have horses listed for sale.
I have no preference and I am sure to have missed many online sales sites. I will talk about the actual buying process in my next post. For now it is enough to say, arm yourself with as much information as you can. I like to see the date a horse is listed (some sites are full of old listings) and I prefer to speak to people on the phone. Email is a good point of contact, but just as it is good to look a horse in the eye, I like to also hear a human voice.
In my next post I will talk about the buying/selling experience.