Oh I cant go anywhere near horse sales these days - I either want to bring them ALL home or I spend weeks after wondering whether they got good homes or imagining what had happened to them!
Little trivia story about one that I purchased from a sale many many years ago - a little Dartmoor gelding, 10 years old, put up for sale by a riding school as they were retiring from the business. Good looking solid bay little chap and I thought he would suit my daughter who was then 7 and ready for a pony who could 'do something'. Ha! Ha! Let the buyer beware!! And he was so angelic looking too!!
Before I had even got him away from the sale he had already kicked two two passersby who had tried to say hello to him!! Once home we soon found that he HATED children!! Teeth or heels, he wasn't bothered - but he was perfect with adults. I got my neighbour's experienced lightweight 12 year old to come round and ride him out - perfect in all ways, in the traffic, off round the woods, everywhere. But when it came to younger children he was a complete menace. Daughter would ask her friends to come and see her new pony, open his stable door a crack for them to peep in and promptly shut it as they were met with a set of teeth!! She did actually ride him every day, but I had to lift her on to avoid her getting a well aimed cow kick if she tried to mount herself from the ground.
Most folks would have given up, but me, being me, realised that underneath everything he was a really nice pony with a kind temperament. He had obviously been teased/manhandled/annoyed by small children in his past. We never told him off for any of his bad temper but just continued to give him love, care, freedom and interesting things to do. It took TWO YEARS!! Then suddenly he changed. Literally one day he actually greeted daughter with a neigh! From that day on they were a pair. She did everything for him. They went off riding for hours alone together, she could even go off for picnic rides with her best friend and her pony down to the woods, where they would let the ponies go wander free (took all the tack off!) while they shared a picnic, and then call the ponies up when they were ready to ride home, but he never wandered far from her. They won loads of rosettes at the fun gymkhana games and even some showing. She took him hunting in the winter months - he looked so cute all clipped out - and he became a 'star' with the hunt as he took on most of the jumps or ploughed his way through areas of undergrowth to keep up with the big horses LOL!! For 6 happy years he was her best friend and constant companion and the best buy I ever made as he taught her that just because he was small, he was still a horse and not a toy, and he demanded and earned her respect which served her well to this day, especially now that we have minis.
Eventually of course she outgrew him, not that she got too heavy but more that her legs were well down below his knee level! We passed him on to a good friend where he spent the next couple of years teaching her daughter some manners (!) before returning to us, where we kept him 'interested' by often leading him out for exercise when riding our big horses - he would spend the ride either trying to bite our stirrups or the knees of the poor leading horse, he never lost his sense of humour!!
He retired to have the free run of our farm, wandering around getting up to mischief, annoying the other horses by running their fences or wandering off down the drive to visit the next door neighbour's orchard to pinch a few apples. In his last couple of years he had a goat friend (an elderly rescue that I saved from a farm closing down), she worshipped him and followed him everywhere, and when eventually the time came when we needed to let him go to Rainbow Bridge we had them both put down together and buried them side by side on the farm with a small plague to mark the spot "Rabbit and Harriet - friends".
Oooop's bit of a long 'trivia' LOL!!