What 'price on enquiry' actually means

There is a listing type on GenoVaq that carries no advertised fee. Where the price should be, it simply says: on enquiry.

Buyers sometimes read that as evasion — the breeding-world equivalent of a menu without prices, where if you have to ask, you can't afford it. It is worth explaining why, for a particular kind of breeder, it means almost exactly the opposite.

The fee is the last thing decided

For a volume stud, a fee is a price in the ordinary sense. The product is standardised, the buyer is interchangeable, and the number can go in the advert.

For a serious breeder of a rare or native breed, almost none of that holds. Whether a mating happens at all depends on the mare or the bitch — her breeding, her health results, and increasingly, in the breeds that manage their populations properly, what the pairing does to the breed's genetic diversity. Several native breed societies now grade proposed matings by exactly this measure, and the breeders we most admire will simply decline a pairing that doubles down on relatives, however good the money.

Which means the fee cannot be first. The conversation is first. The fee follows from what the conversation establishes — sometimes generous terms for exactly the right mare, sometimes a polite no at any price.

A price tag answers the wrong question

There is a second, quieter reason. An advertised fee invites comparison shopping, and comparison shopping presumes the things being compared are alike. Put £600 next to one stud and £900 next to another and you have implied that the difference between them is £300.

But in a small population, the difference between two studs is not £300. It is which lines each carries, how related each is to the mare in question, and what each mating gives to — or takes from — the breed that has to live with the result. A breeder who declines to put a number in the advert is often refusing, deliberately, to let the wrong axis of comparison get started.

What it signals on a listing

So when you see price on enquiry on a GenoVaq listing, read it as information, not concealment. It usually means some combination of the following: the breeder vets buyers rather than serving them; the terms flex with the quality and suitability of your animal; and the mating itself is conditional on more than payment. In the breeds where every pairing matters, that conditionality is the whole job.

We built it as a first-class feature rather than a workaround because the alternative — forcing a number into a box — quietly pushes the most careful breeders off a platform, or pushes them into publishing a fee they don't mean. Neither serves a buyer. What serves a buyer is knowing which kind of seller they are looking at, and this label, honestly used, tells them.

If you have to ask, ask. With this kind of breeder, the asking is the point.

— Rene