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LOL. It is basically the very-young-racehorses equivalent of a horse dealer... someone who buys and sells a lot of horses, turning them around quickly for a profit, such as buying cheaply-acquireable weanlings and feeding and polishing them up over the winter to sell at a profit in six months. By extension, doing the same thing on any horses -- making a large part of your livelihood by what in the real estate world would be called "flipping". Sometimes there is an implication of shady dealings, but this is not necessarily the case -- there are SOME very good horsemen in the world who can do well at this simply because they are very good at recognizing diamonds in the rough and negotiating good deals.
As an aside... I know horse dealers get a bad rap, and certainly it is often well-deserved
, but you know, I grew up riding at a barn where the owner did probably about 1/3 of his business from lessons, 1/3 of his business from mostly B/C-rated hunter shows and hunting with the local pack, and about 1/3 of his business buying meat-price type horses from the New Holland auction and turning them around and reselling them for whatever their abilities suited. I am not saying that, if you wanted papers to go with a certain horse, it couldn't sometimes become whatever breed of horse you happened to want papers on
. But you know, on the whole, he was basically honest most of the time; was an EXCELLENT judge of horses -- it was pretty rare that he'd end up sending a horse *back* to New Holland on the basis of "oops, cannot actually fix up and resell after all", and those few were mostly horses with severe back problems that were not apparent unless bearing a rider's weight; and he got a HUGE number of horses OUT of the slaughter stream and into productive happy homes, be it as put-the-kid-up-occasionally pasture pets or as rated-show hunters or jumpers, depending on the horse.
The trick is to be plugged into the local horse community well enough that you know which dealers it is okay to buy from (and, up to what limits <g>), and which ones to stay away from because they are shadier than you can realistically hope to cope with.
Pat
LOL. It is basically the very-young-racehorses equivalent of a horse dealer... someone who buys and sells a lot of horses, turning them around quickly for a profit, such as buying cheaply-acquireable weanlings and feeding and polishing them up over the winter to sell at a profit in six months. By extension, doing the same thing on any horses -- making a large part of your livelihood by what in the real estate world would be called "flipping". Sometimes there is an implication of shady dealings, but this is not necessarily the case -- there are SOME very good horsemen in the world who can do well at this simply because they are very good at recognizing diamonds in the rough and negotiating good deals.
As an aside... I know horse dealers get a bad rap, and certainly it is often well-deserved
The trick is to be plugged into the local horse community well enough that you know which dealers it is okay to buy from (and, up to what limits <g>), and which ones to stay away from because they are shadier than you can realistically hope to cope with.
Pat
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