>In most western states it is not legal to
transfer ownership of any livestock, including branded or unbranded
horses, without a brand inspection, even if registration papers are
transfered. I know almost no one does it. If you sell a
horse with someone else's brand without having the paperwork (at any
sale for instance) the money will be held till the original owner
clears it.
I'm reminiscing here, but when my parents bought
our ranch, our brand came with it. I can remember when I was a kid, we got
a letter from an auction yard in western Montana somewhere with a picture of a
horse in it. The horse had our brand on it, and someone had
brought it in to sell. Well, we had never seen the horse before in our
lives, but when we got to checking back with the family that had sold us the
ranch, it turned out that someone in the family had lost the horse to a packer
in a poker game, and the packer had later turned all his stock out to winter
somewhere up in the Selway (now a wilderness area), and then had sold his
outfit to somebody, who in turn had rounded up what stock he could find
belonging to the packer. To make a long story short, we sent the
auction yard a bill of sale, since we owned the brand and were sure the
horse had not been stolen from anybody. It was a really nice well-broke
buckskin gelding, as I recall.
