When you’re looking for a horse, look beyond your zip or postal code.  Your perfect horse might be a state away…or a country away…or a continent away.

If you follow the advice in parts I through IV of this series — and in the parts yet to come — you’ll be as prepared as you can be to find the right horse for you.

The horse that will end up in your backyard (literally or figuratively), may not be waiting for you in your backyard.  You may have to travel to find your Prince or Princess Charming.

If you follow my advice (and the advice yet to come), you’ll have pre-qualified your potential equine matches a lot better than you’re able to pre-qualify human matches on match.com.  The horses you’ll want to see will be horses that are worth seeing, which fit your selection criteria.  By the time you hit the road, you’ll know where you may have to compromise and you’ll be able to make decisions more like a bond trader (“Done!”) than like a horse trader (“Really?  I never noticed that [insert defect]”).

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Lichaamstaal from nl

Not the horse’s eyes.  Your eyes.  And someone else’s.  Or more than one someone else’s.

When you see a horse that’s for sale — whether on the internet, in photos or videos, or in person — it’s easy to notice some things and overlook others.

When you’re shopping for yourself, it’s all too easy to be distracted by the horse or some quality of the horse, something you’re delighted to see.

Later, if the horse interests you enough for you to pursue your inquiry, it’s all too easy to be distracted by the horse’s agent or the horse’s owner rather than use your time with the horse to really see the horse.

You may be one of those people that falls in love easily.  Or to whom it’s important to be polite or be liked.  If that’s you, it’s even more critical that you have someone else’s eyes (and likely, mouth).

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It’s nice to have a pretty horse.  But pretty is as pretty does.

When you’re looking for a horse, look for good conformation, because good conformation often indicates soundness.  But color, markings, and conformation attributes that have nothing to do with performance — like small ears or a Roman nose — have no bearing on whether or not a horse will be suitable for you or whether you’ll be happy with the horse you buy.

It wasn’t all that long ago that horses of color may have been discriminated against in the hunter ring and in dressage tests.  Appaloosas, paints, piebalds and skewbalds were all considered to lack the elegance of the classic bay or grey.  The great sire Art Deco has had a lot to do with turning that around, to the point where today, there may be preference but there is very little prejudice.

And just because you have a dream about a beautiful bay horse while you’re horse shopping, don’t take it to be a cosmic sign from the universe or a communication from God that you’re supposed to limit your horse search to bays.  You can also forget about those crazy chestnuts.  Crazy comes in every color.  Blessedly, it doesn’t come very often (although bad training does).

Don’t discount a horse because he’s the wrong breed either.  That Haflinger might be a perfect trade-up from your Holsteiner, the Thoroughbred from your Quarter Horse, the Friesian from your Belgian Warmblood.  Or vice versa.

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Here is our little lady Miss Katherine Meyer again, demonstrating unsuitability of horse and rider in terms of size and shape.

When it comes to selecting a horse that fits you as a rider, there is an ideal size and shape (this is a good thing – how many ideals do we get in life?).

The corollary to this, which is easily overlooked when we’re ready to fall in love with a horse of our own, is that the further away you deviate from that ideal, the less suitable a particular horse will be for you.  (And the less you may enjoy riding, but more on that later in this post.)

Just as a horse that “fits into a box” always looks attractive, so a rider and horse whose bodies fit each other are always appealing to the eye.

Picture the slender, elegant hunter rider on the typey Thoroughbred, with her legs truly wrapping around her horse.  Or the barrel-chested Master of Foxhounds on the field hunter with “good bone.”  And then there are children on ponies — small, medium and large to suit.  It’s an incontrovertible fact that very small children, who are already very cute, become even cuter when sitting on Shetlands.

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What in the horse world is more fraught with difficulty than buying a horse? Maybe only the question of when to say goodbye.

Buying a horse is an enormous undertaking.  Much more enormous, in its own way, than buying a house, even if the price tag is much lower (it is for most of us).  For though we get attached to our houses, we know that although they may be a repository for our emotions, they have none of their own.  They don’t love and long and feel pain, they don’t have eyes and a beating heart and touch our souls the way horses do.

Taking as our premise that buying a horse is an enormous undertaking and thus worthy of serious forethought, let us start with the first truth:  there is no such thing as a perfect horse.

Now that in itself is no reason we shouldn’t try to buy the perfect horse.  On the contrary, we should.  But not the perfect horse in the abstract.  The perfect horse for us.  And not us in the abstract, either.  Us in our true circumstances, whatever they might be.

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Shono-Sasaki Takatsuna fording the Uji river by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798-1861)

When I say “don’t do this at home,” I’m not talking about taking your horse for a swim. I’m talking about what else is going on in this work of art…

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Faroe Islands, Artist: Anker Eli Petersen, date of issue 4/1/2001

USSR stamp, Soviet Cartoon Films, date of issue 2/18/1998

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