The Foal That Did Not Travel

Before we begin, there is something you should know. This is not Harriet's voice. Harriet wrote every word of what follows, and the figures are hers. But she has not yet found the forty-five quiet minutes it takes to record a voice properly, because foals and the horse business keep winning that argument. So I am standing in for her. For now. Everything from here is Harriet. Every American buyer asks me the same two questions, usually in the same order. How much does it cost to get him over here? And how long will it take? I have stopped giving the quick answer, because the quick answer is wrong often enough to be a problem. So let me give you the long one. It takes about ten minutes, and by the end you will know more about importing a horse from England than most people who are already doing it. I am Harriet Smith. We breed and produce showjumpers in Kent, and we send them all over the world. Let me start with the thing that surprises people most. The single biggest variable in what it costs to bring a horse to America is not the horse's price. It is not the airline, or the time of year, or how far you are from the airport. It is whether your horse is a gelding, a mare, or a stallion. Here is why. Britain is classified by the American authorities as affected by a disease called contagious equine metritis. CEM. It is a reproductive infection. That classification is about the country, not about your horse, and it does not mean anybody thinks your horse is carrying anything. But it means this. A gelding of any age is exempt. He lands, does his three days in federal quarantine, and he is yours. A mare over two years old lands, does the same three days, and then goes into a further two to three weeks of CEM quarantine. And a stallion over two years old lands, does his three days, and then goes into thirty to forty-five days of quarantine, during which he has to be live-covered to two test mares, who are then swabbed and blood tested themselves. At your expense. So between a gelding and a stallion bought on the very same day, you are looking at several thousand pounds and about a month of difference. Not because one is a better horse. Purely because of what is underneath him. If you are buying a young horse, there is a nice piece of news in this. A horse under two years old that has never been bred is exempt from CEM altogether. Youngstock are among the simplest horses to import. Right. The money. I am going to give you real numbers, because I have just had our shipper quote them in writing, and I would rather you heard them from me than guessed. Take a gelding, landing in New York. From our yard in Kent to the door of American quarantine is just under ten thousand pounds. That breaks down roughly like this. Three hundred and fifty pounds to get him from Kent down to Europe on the shared lorry. Seven hundred pounds of veterinary work and blood tests before he goes. About fourteen hundred pounds of export certificates, customs clearance and the veterinary inspection at the Calais border post, because since Brexit every horse leaving for Europe goes through one. Two hundred and fifty pounds for a couple of nights stabling near the airport. A hundred and fifty for the agent. Then four thousand three hundred pounds for the flight itself, out of Liège into JFK, sharing a stall three ways, with a professional flying groom on board. And on the other side, about two thousand nine hundred pounds for the three days of quarantine. Just under ten thousand. That is the honest figure, and it is the one I would want to know. Now, three things sit on top of it, and this is where people get caught. The first is the airport. New York is the cheapest way in. Miami, Chicago and Los Angeles all cost more to fly to, and Los Angeles costs more on the ground as well. The gap between landing in New York and landing in Los Angeles is thousands of pounds on the identical horse. If your yard is a long haul from the east coast it can still be worth flying closer to home, but get both numbers before you decide. The second is delivery from quarantine to your barn, which nobody's quote includes, and which is purely a question of distance. And the third is the one that is new, and the one I want you to hear clearly. Since the twenty-fourth of July this year, British goods entering the United States carry an additional ten percent duty. Live horses are not excluded from it. It is charged on the price on the sales invoice, so it scales with the horse. On a twenty-five thousand pound horse, that is two and a half thousand pounds. On a hundred thousand pound horse, it is ten thousand, which is more than the entire cost of shipping him. There is also a customs processing fee, a third of a percent, but that one is small. I will be straight with you. That duty is being challenged in the American courts, and it may not survive. But it is real today, and any advice you read online that says horses enter America duty-free was written before July and has not been updated. Ask your customs broker to confirm the position on the day you buy. Let me talk about foals and broodmares for a moment, because there is a rule here that catches people out. A foal has to be fully weaned and halter broken before the transport can even be booked. Our shipper will not wean a foal on a lorry, and will refuse to collect one that has been weaned too recently. A broodmare has to have her foal taken off her before she is collected too. So a foal is not a horse you decide to send next week. The weaning has to be planned, done properly at home, and the foal needs to lead nicely in a foal slip by the time it travels. I have watched that rule enforced, and I was glad of it. I had a foal being collected from Belgium, and the seller, who was inexperienced, had not weaned it. I had communicated every detail beforehand. The driver was crystal clear with him. That foal would not be shipped. And the lorry left without it. Now, that was inconvenient. It cost me time and it cost me money. And it is exactly what I want to hear. Because the alternative is a company that shrugs and loads the foal anyway. And if a shipper will wave that through, ask yourself what else they will wave through. With your horse. At thirty thousand feet. Where you cannot see them. We ship with John Parker International, and we have never had a shipment go wrong with them. That is the whole of why we use them. They communicate properly, which in this industry is rarer than it ought to be, and their drivers are talented professionals, every one of them a good horseperson. That matters more than people realise, because the driver is the one with your horse at two in the morning at a border. Not me. And a mare in foal can travel, but the window closes earlier than people expect. Roughly two months before she is due, and some carriers are stricter. There is a good reason beyond the obvious one. She needs time to settle in her new surroundings and build the antibodies that go into her colostrum for the foal. So we move her in mid-pregnancy, or we wait until after she has foaled. Now, what do you actually have to do? Very little, and I mean that. We handle the passport and microchip records, the veterinary work and the blood tests, both export health certificates, the customs declarations, and the border inspection. We book the flight and the quarantine through our shipping agent. That is not an extra service. It is part of selling you a horse. That includes the EORI number, which is the customs identifier every British importer and exporter has needed since twenty twenty-three. Because the export declaration is ours to make, the number is ours to hold. You may see guidance telling overseas buyers to go and register for one. You do not need a British customs number to buy a British horse. Two jobs are genuinely yours. You will need a customs broker in the States to handle the entry and the duty, with you as importer of record. And you should commission your own vet to do the pre-purchase examination, independently, with the report and the x-rays going straight to your own veterinarian at home. I would encourage that even if you trust me completely. Especially if you trust me completely. In fact, let me be clearer about that, because it is the thing I feel most strongly about. We do not recommend vets. We give you the options and then we stay out of it. We use Bell Equine locally ourselves and we say so publicly, but we will not steer you. Because the moment we choose your vet, your vetting is worth less. A seller who recommends your vet has quietly taken something from you. The vetting is the one step in this whole process that exists to protect the buyer from the seller, and all of its value comes from the vet owing the seller nothing. So choose your own. And if any seller, me included, pushes you towards a particular practice, treat that as information about the seller. One last thing, and it is the honest bit. There is one genuine risk in this process, and you should know about it before you send money. During American quarantine, every horse is tested for piroplasmosis. If that test comes back not-negative, the horse is refused entry. There is no retest and no appeal. It is uncommon, but it is the reason we test here, at home, weeks before a horse ever gets on a lorry. Those British results are not formally recognised by the American authorities, so they do not guarantee anything. But they are what stops a horse getting all the way to New York and being turned round. That is the process. Weeks, not months, for a gelding. Longer for a mare. Longer again for a stallion. Real money, but knowable money, and none of it hidden. If you want to see what a specific horse would cost, we have put a planner on our website where you can pick any horse in our collection, tell it where you are going and what you are paying, and it will show you every line with the source it came from. It will email you the whole thing if you would like a copy. Or you can just ring me. Honestly, that is easier. I have sent horses to buyers across America, and I would rather talk you through it than have you work it out from a website. Thanks for listening.