Finding Your Next Horse and Arranging a Vetting: Expert Advice from Hook Norton Veterinary Group

Recently, we had the pleasure of attending one of the client education evenings hosted by Hook Norton Veterinary Group, offering valuable guidance for anyone considering buying a new horse and navigating the vetting process.

We’re grateful to Sam Cutts, MRCVS, for sharing her expertise and practical insights. In this blog, we’ve summarised some of the key points from the evening to help you approach your next purchase with confidence and clarity.

Finding your perfect partner

1. Be realistic about your current riding ability and aims

   
   

   "If your child is barely off the lead rein, there is no point buying them for super duper 148 rosette machine up the road who you've been desperate to see your daughter win everything on! Your child needs three more ponies in between before that one. Equally well, you yourself, if you have aspirations of winning Grand Prix Dressage, but you're currently riding at Novice level, there aren't many Grand Prix schoolmasters who are actually right to take somebody from that level all the way up through because they may have too many buttons for what you're used to doing. And the best way to have a successful future is to find the right horse for you as a rider now and which has the ability to take you onto the next step."

2. Take an experienced friend or instructor with you

   
   

   "Even if you are an experienced person yourself, having somebody on the ground who can video, who can watch, and you can then chat about it all with afterwards, is invaluable."

   
   

3. Do your research - competition results / social media

   
   

   "It's really easy these days to find out so much about horses and what they've done. 
Back when I was starting to buy horses as a child, if you wanted to have the BS record, you had to pay £5 and they'd fax it to you.

   ...These days so many people also have social media profiles; it doesn't take too much stalking on Facebook to realise that six months ago they didn't actually win all the competitions that they said that they did."

   
   

4. Don't be afraid to ask to try the horse in different situations or see it doing something specific e.g. loading.

   
   

   "You can be awkward. You're the purchaser. 
So if you think, actually, what I want to do is to hack and I want to know that I can go ride the horse away from a group of other horses on its own, then do that. You need to see it in traffic. Go and ride it in traffic. 
If it's important to you that the horse is good at loading, ask them to load it for you. Don't just take someone's word for it that the horse is good. This is your opportunity to make sure that the horse you think you're buying, really is that good."

5. See the horse loose in the stable.

   
   

   "Very often when you go, they'll be beautifully presented and ready, which is absolutely fine, but you also want to know what that horse does on the stable, whether it has any stable vices, or you see any behaviour you don't like the look of."

   

   
   

6. Watch the horse being tacked up

   
   

   "Check when they put the saddle on, their ears don't go back, or whether they throw their head up. All these sorts of things are really useful for making sure that this is the right horse for you."

   
   

7. Ask for previous veterinary history

   
   

   "I don't necessarily say that everybody needs to in every situation, but certainly with an older horse, it can be useful, just so you have an idea of what's happened, how the horse has been managed in the past, so you have an idea of what management is required going forward."

Why have a pre-purchase examination?

The purpose of such an examination is to assess the suitability for a specific intended use. 
So if you're buying the horse to go and be a happy hack, that's what we will be assessing - whether it's able to do that.

And we're not just looking for things that may be a reason not to buy the horse. We're also looking at things that will perhaps require some management, is there poor horn quality? Might they benefit from a joint supplement? Perhaps their shoeing isn't very good in the first place. Or maybe it's not lame enough to be a problem for passing a vetting, but you think actually it might need some medication in the future. 


So we're also trying to build up a whole picture of 'if you buy this horse, this is what we think you might need to do to give it the best chance for staying the sound for as long as possible and able to do the job that you want.'

It's a thorough assessment in a standardised manner. It's exceptionally good value for a real detailed MOT of every last detail of that horse, so that you've got a degree of confidence going into your new relationship that actually, you know what you're buying and what you're getting yourself into.

For me, what it always comes back to with a vetting is that you have a willing seller, a willing buyer, and it's the vet's job not to get in the way.

If you have any concerns from when you tried the horse, tell us.

You're not telling us how to do our job, you're telling us what you want from us. And the really important thing is that when we've looked at that horse, we've answered all of your questions so that you've got peace of mind going forward to make that informed decision.

Arranging the vetting

So, first step, which practice are you going to use to do a vetting? Can you use your usual practice? How far away is the horse being vetted? 
Do you have a good enough relationship with your vet? Can you say, would you mind driving to Manchester to look at this horse? Or perhaps do they have a friend in Manchester that they could recommend? 


Very often practices won't be happy to vet for their own clients because of the potential for conflict of interest. But if they are happy to, one advantage of using the vendor's vet is that there's an obligation for the vet to disclose any relevant veterinary history they know about that horse.

Do you want a two or a five stage vetting?

Essentially the difference between these is whether or not the horse is ridden. So generally I would say, if your plan is to ride the horse, then you want to see it ridden at the vetting unless we're talking about a horse that is currently so young that it's not backed. 


Do you want the horse to be insured? It's really important to work that out at this stage, because particularly if you're paying generally over about £10,000, then a lot of insurance companies will have specific views on x-rays - e.g. they want specific views in order for them to be happy to cover that horse. You may well want radiographs anyway, particularly for your piece of mind.

Even when people are buying a young horse, even if not for a huge amount of money, they might want a full set of x-rays taken at that point. Because if you're trying to produce the horse to sell on for a large amount of money in the future, you want to know that there aren't any probable deal breakers before you put all that time and effort into the horse. 


Similarly, if you're buying a horse that's competed at a high level and might have a degree of wear and tear, you may well want to have the front legs scanned if it's been an eventer, or hind proximal suspensories scanned if it's been a Dressage horse.

Any other concerns that you have, speak to the vet beforehand, because then we can make sure that we've had a really good look at everything that worries you. 


Where are we going to do that vetting? 


The vendor will almost always want to it to be done at home, even if they're in a muddy field without a stable... But you want to get as much information as possible so that you can make the most informed decision about that your horse.

So we need... a hard flat surface for the hard lunge, and a dark stable so we can look in the horse's eyes properly. A rider for stage three of the vetting and the horses passport and obviously somewhere suitable to ride the horse. In the summer, that can easily be a field, but in the winter that might not be enough!

And when are we going to do it?

Ideally, you as the buyer can be there - then anything that we find at the time, we can show you, and discuss with you. It can be relatively difficult sometimes to explain over the phone what it is that we've seen.

Quite often the vendor will apply a huge amount of time pressure that they want that the vetting done tomorrow, otherwise the horse is definitely going to be sold to somebody else!
And then they will equally get upset if the only person who was free tomorrow was somebody who was perhaps a little bit less experienced and there were quite a lot of findings on the vetting and their feeling was that actually you shouldn't go ahead and the vendor will say "Well, why didn't you send somebody more experienced? Maybe they would have made a different decision!"

Well, sometimes the issue is that the people who are free tomorrow are sometimes the younger vets with less experience, or the vet who doesn't know you personally...
So trying to persuade a vendor actually, I've got a vet I want to use and I want you to wait till next week and they're going to come and do it... You need to explain to them that this is going to play into their hands as well, and get a better decision all round!

The Seller's Declaration

We have a vendor's declaration that we ask the vendor to complete as part of the vetting, but this does not replace a warranty.

So if you're concerned and you want to know the horse doesn't have any vices, or that it does hack on its own or it does load, you need to get that in writing from the vendor yourself because our declaration is helpful - but it's not the same as you having a signed piece of paper between you and the vendor stating all this.

This if from the typical worksheet that many vets use for a vetting and traditionally the vendor was asked to complete and sign this declaration - so it's asking some questions about the horses veterinary history, whether it's had any joint injections in the last 12 months and whether it has any vices.

We realised several years ago that actually the problem is that the person who's presenting the horse at the vetting may only recently have met the horse, so their signature on that wasn't worth very much.

So we've actually created up our own online form, which we send to the both the agent selling the horse and the actual owner of the horse in advanced to the vetting. So we try and have as much information as possible. and actually BEVA (British Equine Veterinary Association) have now decided that's a really good idea. 
So as of last week, they've produced an online declaration which they're encouraging all practices to use.

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To find out more about Hook Norton Equine Vets, visit - https://www.hooknortonvets.co.uk/departments/equinevets/