I don’t know all the information, and truthfully, I don’t want to.

A friends granddaughter came to visit her for a few weeks on spring break.  My friends are here for the winter months.  Somewhere along the line her granddaughter bought a couple of English saddles with fittings, breast collar, saddle pad, and a bareback pad.  All this for the amazing price of $50.00.  Oh my!  The question – could I look at them and tell her what I thought?

Here we go a “Tip Toe Through The Tulips.”  Well the first saddle I wasn’t even sure what it was.  Could be Australian or maybe not.  Odd shape, “D” rings all over the place.  I’m sure it was used for training the horse how to get into a frame, or maybe not.  The second saddle was English, but the leather was just short of cardboard.  It never saw oil in its life.  It didn’t even have a name on it.  The irons, pad, and girth were good.  Now the saddle had been lunch for a rodent.  Chewed through the padding under the gullet.  The breast collar also had never seen oil.  It was a cheap grade of leather and when you bent it, it cracked.  I told her it wouldn’t hold up, but it wouldn’t be dangerous if it broke.  Oil the saddle and see if it will uncurl.  Look on the Internet and see if you could trace the other saddles origins and purpose.  Now the bareback pad was a keeper.

The inevitable question.  Well what do you think?  Well…… if she went to sell everything individually she would probably get her $50.00 back.  Most likely on the bareback pad, the irons, pad, and the girth.

What I wanted to say was unload it as quickly as possible.  Don’t make it travel all the way to Michigan.

Now the next question I have is does her granddaughter know how to fit a saddle and who is she going to use it on?  Is this saddle going to fit her granddaughter?  I never got that far because we were standing in a restaurant parking lot and Bobby was getting ready to leave without me.  I’ll catch up with her before she leaves to go back north and see if I can make any sense out of all this.

I love a great deal just like the next person, but if it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t worth buying.

I think “Let the buyer beware” was coined at a horse auction.  I know “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” was.  You may find out his teeth are older than time itself.

How do you tell them?  Just speak the truth, gently, with love.