RED DEER – When the United States stock market crashed in 2008, horse prices fell right behind it.
There are still mares and stallions selling for six figures at public auction but the recession created an uneven horse market where a few sell for impressive amounts and average animals may not sell at all.
In 2007, three Quarter horse mares with impressive show careers and prize-winning offspring sold for more than $500,000.
“This was our rock and roll year,” said Katie Tims, editor of Quarterhorse News in the U.S., speaking at the annual horse owners and breeders conference in Red Deer Jan. 16.
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“It was just electric to go to these sales. Everything was just wonderful.”
According to Tims, the average American horse owner has an average income of less than $75,000 but before the recession began, there was credit available and excitement in the industry. Money was spent on horses, equipment and shows.
By the end of the futurity sale season in 2008, gross sale averages were down, with the net average on yearlings down 39 percent from the previous year. Average prices for two-year-olds dropped 30 percent.
More horses were selling for less than $2,500 and some were not offered for sale at all as owners decided to wait out the recession.
The top selling horse in 2009 went for $175,000 and some predicted the industry was returning to 1995 prices.
“This was a reality check. We were back to an equilibrium,” Tims said.
Some believe the industry will turn itself around, as suggested earlier this month at the Oklahoma City 2010 Mixed Winter Sale, where a mare sold for $875,000. That tied the 2001 record price for a brood mare.
Tims said the industry still has too many horses. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported 3.6 million horses in 2002 and five years later listed the population at more than four million head owned by about two million people.
However, the industry provided $39 billion to the U.S. economy and created 1.4 million jobs.
The ban on horse processing plants in 2007 also had a drastic effect. The three federally inspected plants were closed by the end of the year at a time when people needed to cull.
Since the ban on slaughtering horses for meat, Tims has travelled to sales at which thin, weak horses sell for $10 each.
Others were turned loose and died of thirst and starvation. Last year, 500 dead horses were found in the Nevada desert and when their manure was tested, 90 percent of it was sand.
“Without the processing option, they have no value unless someone buys them and takes them to Canada or Mexico,” she said.
In 2007, the U.S. slaughtered about 150,000 horses or exported them for processing. In 2008, about 80,000 horses, mules and donkeys were shipped to Canada or Mexico and last year, to the end of September, about 40,000 were exported.
“The biggest horse owner in the country is the United States government,” Tims said.
The government keeps wild and unwanted horses on federal lands or may pay local ranchers to feed them. They are reasonably well cared for and may be sold or adopted but there is no floor price.
“The stage is set for a class of horses that are worth little to nothing.”
