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Originally Posted by Cajungator26
That is SO true, Joel... it's like that all across the board in the horse world. Showing jumpers was the same way for me. It used to cost me $115 every 5 weeks for shoes ALONE per horse. 
Here's the thing though for me... IMO, if an owner is ignorant about the business, then they should make an active effort to become as knowledgeable as possible before jumping in head first. I think that more often than not, people are ignorant about things and ignorance is a HUGE problem. It's nobody's fault but your own if you don't know what kind of game you're getting into. I'm not saying that its right for owners to get ripped off, but if more people knew what they were getting into, there would be less chance of them getting ripped off. |
I agree with your sentiments whole-heartedly, but most prospective owners with that sort of money don't care to afford the time to do that because they don't realize that they could be jumping into a business where they really have to be worried about trusting their confidants/agents.....It is a bizarre shame....
On top of that, we need to make it as easy as possible for owners to get into this game because we need all of them that we can get.....if we start getting a big reputation for scandle and shinnanigans then it is going to do one of two things for people trying to get into the game from an owners investment standpoint:
1) Prospective owners are just going to say 'screw it' and invest in another hobby that they'll enjoy since they realize it won't be a profitable investment - thus why take a chance at getting ripped off on top of it?
2) Will do a lot of research like you mentioned before entrusting anybody with there money....While that is the sart thing to do anyway if you want to be an owner, the way it hurts horse racing is that we're making it harder for someone to be an owner because now they have to do all of this studying and research to understand who to trust because it is such a corrput game....If we have that bad of a reputation that we make it that hard to invest then it is a huge detractor to our sport...We need to make it as easy ad relatively risk-free as it can be....We can't tell them that they will probably lose money and that they might get ripped off at the same time, can we?...NO..
...we need to clean up the game and we need to do it sooner rather than later..........