decisions

I’m going to get a horse in the USA. But where and when start looking? All I knew was that I was going to be searching for a young and tall warmblood with a lot of jumping ability. I had no idea I was going to end up with a thoroughbred.

Well, it didn’t take me long to discover we wouldn't be able to buy a good warmblood, without selling our two mares here in Germany. That being not an option, I started looking for other possibilities.

I have never had anything to do with thoroughbreds, especially not with racehorses. All I know are stereotypes… Thoroughbreds are spooky, they are uncontrollable and everybody trying to retrain on ex racehorse is out of their mind. Well at least that’s what people here seem to think…

Beeing who I am… never going mainstream and loving to prove the opposite … my interest in thoroughbreds grew with every horse I saw. Not long after starting my search I somehow tripped over Elisabeth from Bits&Bytes Farm and her lovely OTTBs. Two horses captured my eye right from the beginning - My Heart and Don. Another one, Memphis joined them on my favorites list.

For what felt like weeks without end, I kept looking at them until I finally called Elisabeth. By then Memphis was gone, so we talked about the other two. It was a long call and I really enjoyed it! Elisabeth is very nice and really cares about the horses. Her goal is to find new homes for former race horses and teach people that thoroughbreds CAN be great sports horses. She helps sell the horses by acting as a broker for their owners and posting information about them on her website. Talking to her made me tend to My Heart, but I still could not make up my mind. During the next weeks I hardly ever stopped thinking about the horses and it almost drove me nuts. Not only, that I could not make up my mind, it was also a strange situation to me. I was thinking about buying a horse thousands of miles away from where I was still living. I was thinking about buying a horse I had never ridden, nor even seen in reality! All I knew about him, I knew from his sales add - some pictures, two videos and what Elisabeth had told me about when she had seen him at the track.

Well as you can see by the name of the blog, I finally did make up my mind and put a deposit on Heart. Only a day later Rule My Heart, as his racing name is, passed the vet check and I signed the bill of sales. I now had officially brought my first American OTTB!!!

Here are some pictures of Rule my Heart while still at the track...