I love how every single horse price post eventually turns into someone climbing up on a soapbox to announce that “back in my day” you could buy a kid-broke, dead quiet, sound, sane, trail rides alone, packs grandkids, doesn’t spook at plastic bags horse for $1,000.
No you couldn’t.
And if you did, it was 1994, gas was under a dollar, hay was free if you knew a guy, and nobody was insuring anything except their pickup.
There are no $1,000 neighbor horses anymore. Your neighbor sold his horse to pay property taxes and still wanted more than that. The mythical pasture unicorn that just stands there, babysits toddlers, and fixes everyone’s confidence issues does not exist - and if it does, it belongs to someone who knows exactly what they have.
And those “perfect horses” you swear you used to own? The ones you remember as saints, angels, and absolute once in a lifetime unicorns?
I promise you when you got them home, you were cussing. You were tired. You were questioning your sanity. You were telling your friends, “I don’t know, it wasn’t supposed to do this,” while holding a lead rope and wondering how you got scammed by a prey animal.
But it’s been ten or twenty years, so all you remember now is the highlight reel. You forgot the bucking phase. You forgot the bolting. You forgot the week it refused to load and the month it tried to run through the bridle. You forgot the trainer bill that made you stare at the wall in silence. You forgot the “maybe I’ll just sell it” conversations that happened at least three times.
Inflation happened. Feed doubled. Hay doubled. Diesel doubled. Vet bills exploded. Trainers didn’t magically get cheaper. Time still costs time, and patience still costs sanity.
Good horses don’t appear because someone wants one cheap. They are made. Slowly. Expensively. With consistency, experience, and a whole lot of unglamorous work that nobody sees on Facebook.
A horse is worth what someone is willing to pay today not what you paid decades ago when you still thought riding in a halter was a personality trait.
If you want a $1,000 horse, you absolutely can find one. But you don’t get to be shocked when it shows up with baggage, opinions, holes, and a past that needs unpacking. Cheap horses aren’t cheap - they’re just billed differently.
The truth nobody wants to say out loud is this: good horses are expensive because they earned it, and so did the people who put the time into making them that way.
The market didn’t change because people got greedy.
It changed because reality showed up.