Musings of the Modern Day Horse- Buying an Equine

Musings of the Modern Horse

I've been teaching a 6-day horsemanship clinic in Southern California despite typical Sunny weather, the joke is I bring changes in the weather. We went from 70 plus degrees on day one to the high of 36 and sleet rain two days later with snow that night.
As I always teach students to be adaptable, so am I in my teachings. We happen to have multiple participants who will be on a horse buying search in the near future.
So it was a great opportunity to discuss so many aspects that the everyday person who has limited horse buying experience can become aware of. A key point was to learn how to predefine each individual's "deal breakers", to prevent them from buying a horse that they are hopeful about, rather than one that currently is capable of doing what the buyers intent with them.
Besides group discussion, we also looked at many horse sales videos. As I say, horses today are not what they were 25 or 30 years ago. Mentally, physically, emotionally they are very different.
The thing about watching these videos come up, which were supposed to be the best version of the horse, as it is literally the sales pitch, is after watching nearly 30 videos we only saw one horse that actually had steering. We only saw 1 horse that licked and chewed as the human was interacting with it. And 98% of the horses were lame. I don't know if the sellers knew, or were just unable to recognize physical issues & lameness.
I know the people I was helping watch the videos could not recognize the lameness. So many horses that I meet are struggling with physical issues nowadays. And I often wonder because the general public does not often associate pain = unwanted or potentially dangerous behaviors in the horse, how many horses live in how much pain, before acting up or creating issues for the human, and then get sold. And then the cycle continues.