Horse Shopping 101

all right folks um today what we're going to do is just take care of a couple things at once a lot of people talk to us about how to find a horse how to buy a horse and um nowadays what i tell them because we get calls from all over the country if somebody wants to go look at a horse and you're in texas and you've got somebody in indiana that you're dealing with i think that you should ask them to make a video not pictures and this is what i would expect from the video if i were you and also my friend brian in south carolina i'm going to show him the video of this horse for him and his wife and that and this is how it works with us this will be his first video of this horse and he's looking for a family ranch horse so i'm thinking this will fit and what we do is what you're about to see and then when i'm day working with ranch horses especially i'll show you know open cattle or trailing or whatever we're doing but anyway i'm going to just kind of talk through some of the things you need to know so as you look in the corral here there's a couple horses in the krill and that's always a good sign because it means that they can be with other horses i always kind of like to see that and if you got one horse by itself you might ask the the man how come it's by itself and you know there's a lot of people that rich enough to have an individual but we don't and some people will show you the single horse on a in a corral and they what they'll tell you is that that day when they wrangled they just peeled that one off that you were interested in and that's viable on a ranch that happens all the time so it's not a big deal but just kind of pay attention to what's going on so now the first thing you want to do is is have have them go catch the horse so you could tell them you want to see them catch the horse and that way you can tell how tough it is to catch or whatever the problem is because if they just send you a video of a horse tied to the tack room with a saddle on it you need to see it caught so these horses we get from mexico takes about three weeks for them to to get on to what's going on and they don't uh they don't have a lot of trust when you first meet them and then after about three weeks they're kind of in your hip pocket so now you've actually seen a horse being caught [Applause] [Music] now deb's just going to cold trail me and you can just kind of see you just watch the horse watch the demeanor watch what it does [Music] now i'm just going to walk up tie the horse and that's something else you want to watch you know how it stands its demeanor all of the above you know since we're starting to kind of share with the public about these horses is that when we get them out of mexico they come off basically most of them off of ranches and people like two kind of horses they like a trail horse but they want a ranch horse and uh the way it works is that we get a my partner's down in mexico he finds him he buys them we've been doing this about 15 years and he he gets him doesn't he's a bonded buyer so he does all the legal work for crossing the border and it's an ordeal crossing the border i don't mind telling you we gotta bleed them and then they're inspected and then they gotta stand in quarantine and get blood again by the united states side and it's a it's an ordeal there you go 57 inches now the another part of it of course is let me show you what you don't accept you don't accept this what you want to see is this a horseshoe can't show a horse with a foot like that uh now for me personally all horses i don't care who they are that's how tight and i tighten them when i first put the saddle on to me it's just kind of the way it's done it's a typical slicer bit for those of you that don't know what a slicer is it's the name of a company and it's just a western bit the reason i like them is because of the weight that's why i asked people to get involved with them and it's a if you don't want to spend four or five hundred dollars on a silver bit then this is what you get a leveraged bit's a leveraged bit whether it's got silver on it or it's a manel all the horses from baja are ridden in a in a chain curb and i ride them in that for about a day then i transition them over to a leather curb strap when they're done what now if you get lower than the horse's eye it's a to me it's kind of an interesting thing to check out on a horse and you'll kind of see which way they put their their body or whether they care or whatever it's just one way to see where a horse is at mentally in other words some horses that are curious and they'll drop their head down want to see what you're doing or play with your hat or whatever and other horses raise their head up and they're they don't want to lower it this horse is just kind of just kind of there so this is just trivia but it's things that you you get to kind of get the idea the demeanor of a horse so he's ready to go and horses out of mexico almost all of them they're broke to walk off as you get on that's the way they teach them so i know that right off the bat i have to teach them to build a bump so they don't walk forward when i do get on i bump then i get on and i don't let him walk off well he's fine so you want to have the whoever's showing you the horse show them what they can sitting on their back and then walk trot and lope and that's pretty much the big picture so that's what i'm going to do and then i'll come back to the tack room [Music] so [Music] i like my horses to ride on a loop and i don't want to be hanging on a horse to to him to ride it this horse has got that good walk that i like and uh this is this is video number one this is how you check a horse out if you're interested in buying them so there again you know a lot of people buy a horse by how pretty the mane of the tail is and then oh by the way what can it do so what i want you to think about is what your what your abilities are what's your birthday cake look like how often have you been to icu and do you just want to ride down and get the mail or what do you want to do or you ride with groups or do you think about what you're doing and then evaluate that as to what you're looking at and and what's happened in the since we've been visiting with people is a lot of people got a hold of us and said i'm looking at this horse would you give me your opinion well my opinion isn't that big a deal you're the one spending the money but what i tell them is is if they won't send you a video of what you just watched then don't buy the horse and especially if they won't ride it anyway that's covering two bases and brian this is for you and everybody else that's interested in you know on how to go about getting a horse now i did want to tell you folks who are interested in grazing which there seems to be quite a few i joke about what not having no grass out here but for you kids that are homeschooling instead of playing games look up the sigmoid curve is what it's called and that's about the growth of grass and what happens is out here and in the spring wherever when grass first comes up it's 90 percent water okay we call that washi grass and that's what gives them the scours spring grass goes right through them and then as the plant matures and the water level goes down and the nutrition level comes up then it's what we call hard grass but what it does is the sigmoid curve the beginning is washi grass and the end is lignification or cellulose or what we call dry grass it's yellow so that's a cycle now what you got to know where you live is what's your cycle if you live in montana you know most of your cycles white then after that you get green but the beauty of the northern range is that the grass is really strong because of all the nitrogen put in with the snow and in the southeast there's more grass but there's also more water in it and it's not as high in value so there is a trade-off so when you're talking about grass you have to know exactly where you're talking about what part of the united states and that dictates the kind of feed that you're going to raise and like in the southeast they they adjust they adjust their cattle to what kind of feed they got same with up north so anyway that's a little tidbit on the on the grass deal no grass no cow thank you [Music] you

Channel: Pat & Deb Puckett

Views: 305,751

Keywords: Pat Puckett, The Disciplined Ride, Buying a Horse, Ranch Horse for Sale, Deb Puckett

Id: YAf8KR-0AWI

Length: 18min 10sec (1090 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 14 2021