30/08/2026
I absolutely love getting to be their biggest cheerleaders when they find their new humans 🩷 I am lucky enough to get updates from a lot of the ponies/horses that we have found their perfect humans for and it really does make it all worth it.
I’m sorry to say that recently we have had a huge uplift in not so kind people wanting to view our horses, to mention some of things that have happened and sadly this isn’t all nor anywhere near the worst;
- agressive/threatening/intimidating messages to force an unseen purchase at a dramatically reduced price, getting multiple different members of the family to continuously call and message. I will NEVER sell unseen so please look elsewhere if this is what you want to do.
- awful riding, and I don’t mean novice riders as we are very very good at catering for novice or nervous riders and a majority of our horses are produced for this in mind. I mean aggressive & bordering abusive riding.
- people that are far far to heavy turning up to ride small horses/ponies
- people that spend hours and hours of mine and my teams time and then never make contact again. I have absolutely 0 issues if you decide the horse/pony is not appropriate for your requirements but to not even send a text saying “thanks but no thanks” is down right rude.
- people that clearly have not read the adverts which are in depth and offer alot of information about the horse/pony, after reading the adverts you should be confident on whether the horse/pony is what you are looking for. People coming to view a CobxShire and then arriving and saying “well she’s quite cobby” will make me very angry, yes of course she is, she’s a shire x cob, in the 100s of videos and pictures you can see what she visually looks like.
- people saying they would like to purchase the horse pending vetting, stringing me along for days over not able to transfer the deposit for every reason under the sun, and then 3-4 days later pulling out of the sale. I presume they are viewing others in this time but don’t want to miss out on mine either.
- people turning up with everyone from their village, yes I appreciate bringing your friend/trainer/more experienced individual, but bringing 5-6 people with you just isn’t ok. The horses do not enjoy viewings and find them stressful and difficult and having 5-6 people in their stable plus me and my rider is far too many and everyone prodding and poking them around.
-people calling and messaging from 5am in the morning untill 1am the following evening, this isn’t ok, what other business would you call at 10pm? Midnight? 1am? No1 absolutely no1.
-and of course the normal, book a viewing, never turn up, never hear from them again.
If all this continues then I will have no choice but to seriously consider changing how we operate and how we offer viewings as it just isn’t financially sustainable. To put it into context we are a VERY small team, there is only 4 members of staff total including myself, and 3 on site a day, therefore when you come to a viewing and take up atleast 2 hours of mine plus my riders time, that’s 4 labour hours, not to mention the hour prior to the viewing grooming/bathing the horse, cleaning the tack, that leaves the other member of staff to do the entire yard, which consists of 8 sales horses plus 10 full livery horses, we do not operate as a normal sales yard, all of our horses live the same life as my full liveries which means, they all need bringing in, in the morning, they all get their breakfast and rugs changed, they then get their fields poo picked, and then ad-lib hay put out for them, they then all get turned back out again for the afternoon and evening, their stables all then need doing, and they need their tea, which means no other horses get ridden that day, we cannot have the farrier, we cannot have the physio, we cannot have more than 1 viewing in a day as we value the horses having a normal routine over the ease of them living in or living out. So I’m sure you can imagine if we have a week of viewings this can mean the others are potentially not ridden all week, so when the people turning up for viewings are absolutely awful to me, my girls, or MY horses, as yes you are forgetting at the time of the viewing they are MY horse it makes life not so great, when we know immediately that you are completely wasting our time and know the rest of the day is going to be a nightmare because you have taken hours of our time for no reason other than you don’t want to go and pay a riding school it starts to make the days very long and very painful 😞😞
We are lucky to have some absolutely lovely horses and have found them the most perfect homes with some absolutely lovely people which has been fantastic, and have had viewings with people that are genuine, friendly and kind and don’t buy the horse which is equally just as lovely and we have been able to help them with their next viewing or help them decide what it is they actually want 🥰
But recently it has been bad, very bad, so please be considerate, kind and realistic when buying. I will not be doing viewings without videos of you riding, and all under 18s must wear a body protector.
Sunday moan over 😂
