There are approximately 9 million horses in the United States, and at the auction there were two hundred of not necessarily the unwanted but surely the unlucky. We will come back safely.īEFORE THE AUCTION BEGAN, I had walked through the barns adjoining the auction ring where the horses stood tied to their posts. This might possibly be their last chance to perform, and they mustered up that certain nobility and courage possessed by horses, as though they had upon their backs the Navajo of long ago, the warriors who, before battle, would whisper into the ears of their horses: Be brave and nothing will happen. They were willing to do as asked, as they’ve been over the centuries - to churn the soil in our fields, to fight our battles, to run our races until their lungs bleed or their bones break. They aim to please because they’ve learned to trust, which meant that even the strong and healthy horses, of which there were many, obediently did as they were told amid the chaos of the auction: go forward go back turn left, now right stop, immediately go fast, go slow stand still. Horses are flight animals they flee at the unfamiliar fear is their dominant emotion. Given the noisy crowd and the loud, stern voice of the auctioneer calling out in rapid-fire succession the back-and-forth bidding for the animals, I did not expect the saddle horses to try so hard to do well.
More than once the black-bearded Mennonite man running the auction - someone called him Zimmerman - asked the audience to settle down. If there was any bidding for her, I didn’t hear or see it.
Her head hanging low, she slowly walked around the ring, only once, and then stepped out a side exit. That particular Thoroughbred mare, whose long, flaxen mane and tail were braided, must have had someone who had cared enough for her to make her pretty, perhaps believing this would help sell her to a good home, where a girl might braid her once again. The fate of those horses that entered and exited the ring quickly - such as one thin copper-colored Thoroughbred mare I remember - seemed bleak, the implication being that the horse was barely worth the time it took to auction off. A “loose horse” was a horse that came into the auction ring without a rider the horses with riders were called “saddle horses.” Loose horses are at a disadvantage in terms of finding a good home because even though they are often saddle broke they nonetheless sell for less without a rider atop them in the ring. We all sat sandwiched together in the steep, gray bleachers that formed an oval around the dirt ring in which the horses were shown, one after another, from ten a.m. People talked, laughed, visited, ate hot dogs, Amish pies, and French fries. I took a seat in the large crowd of people - with the Amish men wearing straw hats, black pants, and jackets with the Mennonite men in their black hats and suspendered pants with the city slickers from somewhere else and the country folk from nearby with children and their grandparents fussing over spilled sodas.
But I could not foresee, in the spare few minutes each horse at such an auction is given to demonstrate its abilities, personality, strength, or lack thereof (whether young or old, muscled or thin), that I’d be able to determine whether any particular horse would be the one for me.īesides, it was hard to even think at the auction. I spend a significant amount of time with them and can groom them, bathe them, saddle them, walk them, run them on a lead, ride them, feed them, blanket them, work them in a round pen, give them medicine, soak their sore hooves, lift and stretch their hindlegs and forelegs, clean the undersides of their feet, bandage their legs, and minister to their wounds. I went to the New Holland Livestock Auction in the Amish and Mennonite country of New Holland, Pennsylvania, where each week horses are sold - though I’d no intention of buying one. Not an auction for priceless art or jewelry or land.
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