Unscrupulous agents can take a newcomer for a ride, but not all of them are bad apples

IN AN IDEAL world, only top mares would be owned and bred. In an ideal world, everyone would have enough money to purchase a top mare. In an ideal world, I would still be a veterinarian, but first I would have been a Hall of Fame baseball player.

But it is not an ideal world. Cheap mares are owned and bred because most people cannot afford a top mare. And my fastball was not.

Ignoring my baseball aspirations, there are a lot of unwealthy people out there who want to breed Thoroughbreds and cannot afford a six-figure mare, or even a five-figure mare. There is no reason why they should not own a mare, or mares, though, if they are aware of what they are doing and the odds against anything more than moderate success, if that. Owning a mare, planning a mating, and raising a foal are enjoyable, maybe even therapeutic in some cases.

The secret, I think, is to acquire the best-quality mare that can be justified with the money available to spend. If $15,000 is all you can spend, buy accordingly. If $5,000 is the limit, buy the best $5,000 mare you can find. If you are unsure how to proceed, advice is available: agents. A good, honest agent more than earns his or her commission.

All agents, however, are not good or honest.

Hidden agenda

Many years ago, a client of mine--Bart was his name--was an agent who also owned a farm. Mares he had purchased for his clients came and went, and I never knew anything about his dealings. He and his clients always paid on time, and that was good enough for me.

At a November breeding stock sale one year, he came to me with a new client. He introduced us and said, "Mr. Weldon intends to buy some mares and board them with me. He wanted to meet the vet who will care for them."

That was good news: a commission and boarders for him, and mares to work on for me.

"I plan to spend $125,000, more or less," Weldon said. "Great," I responded. "You should be able to get a pretty nice mare or two for that."

"Oh, no," he said. "Bart says I should buy about 20."

I started to say something, but Bart hurried him off. "I'll have you check the mares after we've bought them," he called back over his shoulder. I was dumbfounded.

A half-hour later, I ran into Bart, sans Weldon, in the restroom. He laughed. "Brent, you almost screwed up," he said. He explained what he was up to. He would receive the same commission from Weldon on his $125,000 whether it was spent on one mare or 125, but the board on 20 would be vastly greater than the board on one or two. And, he added, I also would benefit more from 20 mares than from a couple. Charging for deworming, vaccinating, palpating, culturing, and all the other various and sundry health care procedures on 20 mares and their offspring could very well put me in another tax bracket, he said.

I told him I thought he was taking advantage of the guy. "That's the horse business," he told me, and winked.

Bart purchased 26 mares for Weldon and spent $127,000 of the man's money. Occasionally, a carefully selected $5,000 mare can be a good buy, but two dozen purchased randomly cannot be. None of the 26 mares had been a good racehorse, and none had produced anything that could run well enough to justify training bills.

If I were as good a person as I sometimes profess to be, I would have quit then and never worked on Weldon's mares, but I am not, and I did not. I guess I rationalized that someone would do the veterinary work and charge for it, so it might as well be me. And it was, even though I felt guilty about it each time I realized what the poor guy was having to spend. Weldon's veterinary bills would sometimes run as much as $5,000 a month during the breeding season.

Within four years, Weldon became completely disillusioned and got out of the horse business, nearly broke. Fifteen dollars a day board per horse for 26 mares and their offspring, not to mention stud fees and those horrendous veterinary bills, can put a dent in anyone's bank account. The foals the mares produced were worth little; most of them sold for $1,000 to $3,000. When Weldon sold out, the 26 mares that had averaged about $5,000 each when he bought them were older and still had not produced anything worth the expense of breeding and upkeep. They brought an average price of slightly more than $3,500 each.

It should have been a crime, but it was, as Bart said many times, "the horse business." I ended my association with him.

Padding the bill

A few years later, Jon, a local man, wanted to enter the horse business. He had made a lot of money in the business world and knew he needed decent-quality mares to make a go of it, so he decided to buy five or six in the $50,000 to $70,000 range.

He was unfamiliar with conformation, pedigrees, and the vagaries of auctions, so he wisely consulted an agent, into whose hands he placed his entire equine financial operation: purchase of mares, acquisition of stallion seasons, and the promise to let the agent sell his yearlings for him when the time came.

Jon had inherited a farm, but it was just open land that had been used for crops years ago, and no livestock had been on it for decades. He spent a few hundred thousand dollars to build proper barns and fences for his new undertaking. I came into the picture when Jon asked an adjacent farm owner, my friend Fred Ballenger, to suggest a veterinarian. I was Fred's veterinarian, so he suggested me.

Later, while checking sales results in one of the weekly Thoroughbred industry magazines, Fred noticed that one of Jon's mares, for which Jon said he had paid $55,000, was recorded as not meeting its reserve at $45,000. He looked up Jon's other mares; each one had been RNA at $10,000 below the price Jon claimed he had paid for them. (RNA, which stands for reserve not attained, is the notation the sales company makes in the sales summaries for a horse that did not bring the amount the seller wanted and, therefore, did not sell.)

Not knowing what was going on--maybe Jon reported inflated prices out of ego--Fred did not say anything to him about it. He mentioned it to me one day, but I did not understand it, either.

Jon's agent lined up some nice stallions for the mares, but I had the feeling, and Fred mentioned it, too, that maybe they were just a hair below the quality the mares warranted. Fortunately, all five mares conceived. However, the following spring, one mare delivered live twins on a contract that negated the fee (which had been paid September 1) if the twins were not registered. Most stallion contracts stipulate a live foal guarantee, and many have the twin provision included.

Jon called the agent and requested a refund of the $15,000 stud fee. Many weeks passed. After several requests, the agent finally told him that the stud farm would not refund the fee and he was "working on it."

Jon decided to go to the source. He contacted the stud farm. The people at the farm said they had heard nothing from the agent and knew nothing about the twins, but told him the refund would be made immediately on receiving a veterinary certificate attesting to the fact that live twins had been born to his mare. I gave him another certificate (I had given the first one to his agent), and a few days later Jon received a check for $7,500.

He was angry. No, actually, he was irate. He called back and demanded his remaining $7,500. The stud farm informed him that the contract the agent had signed had been for a $7,500 fee, not the $15,000 the agent had charged Jon. He went to the stud farm in person and saw the contract bearing the agent's signature.

The stud farm's general manager sympathized with Jon for having the twins and told Jon it had hurt them, too. Jon's mare had been far better quality than the ones normally sent to that particular stallion, so if the mare had produced a good runner, it would have enhanced the stallion's reputation. "This mare could easily be bred to a $25,000 stud," the general manager said.

Subsequent inquiries at other farms revealed that the other four stallion contracts had been handled in the same manner: The agent had doubled the price in each case.

On hearing of this, Fred told Jon about the RNA prices he had seen. Jon contacted the sellers individually and learned that the agent had approached each of them after their mares went through the ring unsold and offered them $5,000 more than the RNA price, which they accepted. The agent then told Jon the price was $10,000 more than the RNA, and he pocketed the additional $5,000. He also charged Jon his commission based on the price he had allegedly paid for each mare ($10,000 more than the RNA).

Legal action ensued, and Jon recovered a portion of his money, but it took nearly three years and thousands of dollars in legal fees. He was so disenchanted that he, too, left the horse business. Fortunately, his mares kept their value and their foals were worth a little, too, so he actually came out in pretty good shape.

Not all bad

This is not an indictment of all agents. Good ones are invaluable, but a newcomer must be careful when choosing one, and he must authorize the agent to buy the best horses his wallet can afford--no more, no less. If he needs advice on matings and marketing, he should get it. After that, it is up to him to enjoy owning those horses.

It is not an ideal world, but the right advice and the right horses can make it pretty doggone good.