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Insurance
Original article written by Autumn Blackmill posted 5 months 2 weeks agoYou’re going along with your day, blissfully unaware that you are about to be hit with the worst thing that can randomly happen to your stable. Oh, what’s this? A message?! You eagerly open up your inbox to find the dreaded “Horse Alert” indicating that one of the poor souls under your care has had an unfortunate stable accident and been permanently injured. Your heart sinks, and you cross your fingers in hope that it isn’t one of your favorites.
Stable accidents are the bane of any stable. They can strike when you least expect it, and sometimes you don’t get one for several years and think that your stable is too small for the SIM gods to direct their ire towards. You would be wrong, of course. But what does a stable accident do? Well, if you have a horse who is not retired (so those racing, yearlings, or foals) it forces them to retire. It can be a real stroke of bad luck to lose a nice racing prospect this way. Double so if it is a young colt, as they should hit the $350k mark in earnings before retiring to stud. Don’t think you can get away with standing him at stud anyways, the horse needs to have won at least one race before enjoying a career as a stallion. Fillies are a slightly different story. It can be annoying to lose a nice racing filly to a random accident, but at least you can always breed her and hopefully make more nice racing prospects.
The real pain comes when a stable accident hits a broodmare (we’re ignoring the studs for the moment). You see, when a retired horse gets into an accident, it pensions them. That cute little blue hen you have? Now she is a mighty fine pasture puff, taunting you with what could have been. That filly you retired the other day with the amazing pedigree? She gets to frolic around with that pedigree and no foals to her name. FOREVER.
All this might keep you up at night. Nightmares of your favorite horses kicking their stalls and injuring themselves just to get out of a little work. Have no fear, however, because you can prevent this with a little thing called insurance. Purchase it once, and the horse stays insured for life. Any random injuries that could happen to it are thwarted! Though any injuries from over-exercising it are still fair game.
This way you can protect the horses that are important to you. The broodmare that gives you your best runners each year is just as perfect a candidate for insurance as the stakes yearling you bred. And if you spent an arm and a leg on a breeding, insuring a foal is a very wise choice. Studs are almost always guaranteed to have it, since they tend to be great runners on the track and earn their insurance back in stud fees (if they're worth their salt!).
The fees change with age, and jump from moderately expensive to very expensive from foal to yearling. So if you think you might have a nice one, insure it as a foal! Otherwise you need to wait until their three year old season to get the same deal. I’m probably not explaining it well, so here are the numbers!
Foals: $30,000
Yearlings: $75,000
2 Year Olds: $50,000
3 Year Olds: $30,000
4 Year Olds+: $25,000
The fees are different depending on the breeds. So at least an appy breeder isn’t staring at a $75k fee! You can find them all in this link to the help center:
https://www.simhorseracing.com/simforum/viewtopic.php?t=19212
*This article may or may not have been written after a nice broodmare prospect of mine got hit by the ol’ pension stick. Insure your nice mares!