LH becomes... MH... Aka Ben!

Through a series of fortunate circumstances, starting with connecting with Ben and his owner at all and ending with a "that is an incredibly sound horse" from his vet doing his PPE, Ben became my horse today. His owner is in California and his previous lease was in Virginia, so even him coming down to Florida was a nice connection of trainers and timing. I was looking for something to ride while Yoshi was recovering. A possible lease on an AMAZING 3* horse had just fallen through and then Ben's trainer from CA contacted JT to see if she knew anyone looking for a lease. JT asked if he was nice and got a resounding YES. So I connected with Ben's owner, and we arranged to have him shipped down. His owner said ideally I'd fall in love and buy him, but if not then JT was going to market and sell him for her after the lease.

He does have sarcoids, a known quantity when we agreed to the lease. But when he arrived sporting a grapefruit sized one on his sheath, I got cold feet about the potential of buying him with a known health issue. His owner and I still worked out lease terms though and the rest is documented here.

JT and I had been casually horse shopping and went and saw a lovely 5 year old two weeks ago. After I rode him I thought about what kind of incredibly thorough vetting I was going to put him through. And then thought about the panic that would follow spending that amount of money on a promising prospect. Now the horse market is what it is right now, and I am definitely not saying that gelding wasn't worth every bit of the asking price, but I started to have some major cold feet about taking that gamble again. This panic only worsened as I pulled up papers trying and failing to correlate clinical signs and radiographic changes of cervical OA. 

And I started wondering if maybe I was ignoring the very nice, sound thing that was right in front of me. In addition to being fancy as all get out and very capable scope wise, he is just a really nice person as JT puts it. Watching him go through all the treatment for his sarcoid on his sheath of all places and never once offer to kick any one of us in the head just made me fall in love with him. He's also not taken an unsound step the whole time we've had him. He's been running around novice for several years at this point, so he's doing the thing well and soundly. The sarcoids are a constant risk and at some point they may pop up in a very inconvenient spot. But I'm prepared for that and prepared to treat them as they happen. His responded really well to immunocidin injections, which his vet said likely meant any future ones would as well. 

After I tumbled all this around in my head for a while, I decided the known quantity was better than the unknown. He's a really cool horse who I truly enjoy just spending time with. And while his occasional spooks at silly things were off putting at first coming from Yoshi, now I just smile a little bit and coax him past it. I ran the whole thing past JT who also really likes him and she was completely on board. 

I spoke to his owner and told her the original plan of me falling in love with him had worked. We settled on terms and his PPE was on Friday. His vet reviewed his X-rays and compared them to the X-rays from his 2015 PPE. There were very few changes over the time span of 7 years, how cool is that?!?!  

Welcome to the family, Ben!