BY LAUREN MAULDIN
It’s happened. Maybe at the office during a work lunch. Maybe a family reunion with a distant cousin. One of the peripheral people in your life who only knows one fact about you (she rides horses!) has asked a dreaded question: how much do horses cost anyway?
I hate this question. It’s not because I’m secretive about money. I like having straightforward conversations about finances because I think it takes away some of the mystery and power around financial stability. But with horses? That’s totally different. How do I even begin to answer this question?
I want to answer everything. They cost everything. Your time, your heart, and definitely all your disposable income. It doesn’t even matter how much extra money you have, they cost all of it (and then some). They cost in ways you don’t care about, like an extra $20 bag of treats from the tack store because you’re running low on bestest ponykins favorite horse muffins. They cost in ways that break you, like when you’re finally about to finish rehab and your horse reinjures the same ligament you’ve been nursing back to health for the last 8 months.
But the sales manager you’re sitting next to at this conference didn’t ask how much horses cost so you could sob into your coffee about lost savings and lost dreams, so you get back to the original question.
“Well, there are different kinds of horses…” I start to say. I want to simply explain that there are show horses and pet horses, and pleasure horses, and all of them have different costs associated with them, but then I realize I don’t even know what a safe pleasure horse costs these days. Early in my riding career, you could find a decent safe horse for $3,000 in the local newspaper back in 2000, but now my social media feed is flooded with grade horses selling at Amish auctions for $35,000 and kind semi-retired trail horses for “Private Inquiries Only.”
I decide to stick to what I know, and speak on the hunter/jumper show world. Which might be a mistake, but I start out with a metaphor, I think they’ll understand—“While there’s a big range, my horse costs as much as a crossover SUV… not a fancy one or—”
They’ve cut me off, flabbergasted that a horse can cost as much as a car and that I have paid as much as a car for my single horsepower, very slow 0 to 60mph, not even hybrid, horse.
Oh boy. They’re not going to take it well when I say I often compete against horses in my division that cost as much as my house. As in the thing I have mortgaged for 25 more years, and horse purchases don’t come with good financing options in my experience. I have not once been prompted to take a cash-out refinance on my adult amateur hunter.
I hate the horse cost question with non-horse people because there is no good way to answer it. Yes, these prices are all absurd. I can’t look you in the face with good faith and say I think that a top show hunter should have a mid six-figure yearly lease price. But I also can’t say that the prices are necessarily unfair either. It takes a lot of money to produce a nice horse, no matter what you’re doing with that horse. And if you’re a wealthy family that has a precious small child who wants to compete in the pony hunters, you’re going to put your kid on the best quality, safest pony that you can afford.
The baseline cost of “horse” for me is everything I can devote to this sport and sleep at night. One of my best horses ever had a $0 purchase price. My horse now is that crossover SUV. I have never bought any horse for any sum that I wasn’t willing to practically burn on fire, because that’s about the same amount of financial security that horses provide.
I always attempt to answer the “What do horses cost?” question because I think information is power, and I want to let outsiders know more about this world. But the truth is, horses cost whatever you’re willing to give. For those of us who love them, that’s often more than we should, but exactly what we must.
About the Author: Lauren holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of California Riverside, and is a lifelong rider and writer. Through her writing she explores the intersections of mental health, equestrian lifestyle, and healing. She lives in Austin, Texas with her wife and furbabies and shows in the Adult Amateur hunters with her horse, Crusero.
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