The Consignors and Commercial Breeders Association (CBA) has developed a series of questionnaires that are designed to help standardize the pre-sale information that consignors gather from horse owners or their representatives. There are separate questionnaires for weanlings, yearlings, broodmares/broodmare prospects, and racing prospects. The questionnaires can be viewed and downloaded from the organization’s Web site: www.consignorsandbreeders.com.
Bayne Welker, CBA president and chairman, said there were several reasons why the questionnaires were created.
“No. 1, it was to help consignors meet the conditions of sale,” he explained. “No. 2, it was to help consignors market their horses and answer questions from the buying public, and No. 3, it was to gather information about any type of special handling issues with horses. For example, there are certain horses that scope better (stand more quietly during an endoscopic throat examination) with a lip shank than with a twitch.”
The questionnaires for weanlings and yearlings include requests for information about such veterinary interventions as invasive joint surgeries, abdominal surgeries, and invasive limb alignment procedures. The questionnaire for racing prospects asks for information about any anabolic steroids a horse has received.
“The one questionnaire that probably goes the most in depth is the one for the racing prospects,” Welker said. “There probably has been very little information about them available at sales in the past.”
On each questionnaire there is a place where the person who is providing the information can sign his name and identify how he is associated with the horse: trainer, farm manager, etc.
“We are trying to set the best standards for industry practices,” Welker said. “This is something we created to benefit the consignor, but at the same time, it will have a reciprocal benefit for the buying public. In the long run, what we hope it does is create a standard so that a buyer will know that when he is dealing with a CBA consignor, he (the consignor) has put for his best effort to collect as much information about a horse as he possibly can.”
