Fancy Horses

Horses came with the package. Long ago, after rekindling the romance, my future wife moved with everything she had to the Twin Cities to be with me. Everything she had fit into the trunk of her Dodge Dart. Everything except for two 1,200 pound animals that were as foreign to me as a Hunter's Hartebeest.

We didn't have a pot or a window, with macaroni and cheese our staple, but those horses were cared for. And they followed us to Oklahoma, and back again. The kids grew up with three horses as siblings. With the exception of the years lived overseas, horses have always been part of the family.

Over the course of those many years, Bonnie has had sole responsibility for acquiring new horses when the inventory fell too low. In all cases, the acquisition process was measured in months or years, for she's as partciular as they come. A good thing, because the record of safety on the part of any horse we've had has been flawless. So I was a little surprised when she expressed interest in going to a horse auction recently.

It's not that you can't find good horses at a horse auction. You can. But you can't buy them in a way that allows a thorough inspection, a test drive, and a few hours of conversation with the owner. In this particular auction, there were about 80 horses to be sold, all of them paraded in the ring at one time or another until all 80 were demonstrated over a five hour period. The audience was not incidental either. There must have been more than a thousand spectators milling around the sale ring during the auction itself.

Which seems remarkable since we were in the very small town of Iowa Falls, Iowa. We were told the equestrian center was part of Ellsworth Community College. When we arrived, we found the college, a modest collection of buildings in the center of town, but not the equestrian center. As it turned out, it was south of town, gleaming off the main highway, with huge barns and multiple entrances. Trucks and trailers littered the surrounding landscape. There must have been a hundred of them. In my mind I tried to do a quick calculation of the value of all those trucks and trailers and lost track after $10 million. Where did they all come from? How did they all end up here in the small town of Iowa Falls.

The answer was the Schmitt family. For three generations, they have been raising and training horses, and once a year they bring them to market at their own horse auction. Apparently, they sold their own auction barn in their home town of Plain, Wisconsin, 200 miles away. Development in the town was closing in on them, so they decided local logistics were too complicated. Since then, they've worked with the college to rent their facility and set up shop for a full week once a year.

Bonnie was in her element. I followed along as she peeked in stalls, stroked manes, scratched chests, and intermingled with horse and riders as they warmed up for their demo rides. This horse had too many white socks (white socks, or color of the hair at the bottom of their legs often mean light colored skin underneath, increasing the likelihood of being susceptible to an infection called scratches); that horse has feet proportionally small for their body, increasing the chance for lameness later in life; others had sloping backs that would probably make riding uncomfortable. But mainly a large percentage of the horses were smaller in size, ideal for a cutting horse or one that competes in barrel racing, but not so ideal when carrying a 220 pound 6' 4" lug and 40 pound saddle on their back.

She whittled the list of considerations down to about four. As the auction started, the first couple of horses on the block sold for under $5,000. Pretty stiff, I thought, but doable. Then a couple of horses brought well north of $10,000. Of course I had no clue what the difference was, but Bonnie would be nodding her head yes as she recorded the sold price in her program. Something about lineage and a sire or a dam who had made money in competitions of the past. When a couple horses sold for north of $30k, she knew we were out of our element. Beautiful horses, for sure, but not that beautiful. If that horse goes lame, or fetches one of the many health risks they face, that's tens of thousands down the drain in a flash. More than we can bear.

So the search continues, but probably back to individuals offering their best friends on the internet, or from some whisper among the community. That's okay. Dundee and Trace are doing just fine.