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Equine transport market (both ground and air) in the US: how many professionals and companies are involved in the transport of horses across the US. This would be both trailering companies and flight companies that haul or are (flight) agents for equine travel.
While there is no pre-existing information to fully answer your question, I have used available data to pull together the following key findings: (a) there are at least 114 United States-based equine transport companies listed in Hoovers' company database, (b) of these 114 companies, 96.4% or 110 have no more than 4 employees, and (c) lastly, there are 29,862,572 companies in the United States, but only 52.3% or 15,619,190 are listed in the Hoovers' company database.
Below you will find an outline of my research methodology to better understand why the information you have requested is publicly unavailable, as well as a deep dive into my findings.
METHODOLOGY AND FINDINGS
To answer your question, I first looked for industry reports on equine transport and horse transport, as industry reports such as those by IBISWorld contain the number of businesses and employees in the industry. I was unable to find any, however, even after expanding my search to older sources. I came across one study published in 2005, but it does not have figures pertaining to employment and number of transport companies. In the study, it was mentioned that horse-related transportation (e.g. trailering) had a $7.946-billion impact on the GDP of the United States and that the average annual trailering and horse transport expense per horse was $153.
Since there are no helpful industry reports, I proceeded with searching for the corresponding North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code of the equine transport industry. From the United States Census Bureau's latest list of NAICS codes, I learned that the industry classification system is not that granular for equine transport to be assigned its own separate NAICS code. While equine transport is certainly a part of the transportation and warehousing sector with NAICS code 48-49, it is not clear which 6-digit NAICS code it belongs to. There is no consistency in the industry classification of equine transport firms, as can be observed in the business directory Manta. In said directory, for example, Cox Equine Transport is listed as belonging to "488999, All Other Support Activities for Transportation," while Happy Trails Equine Transport is listed as belonging to "484220, Specialized Freight (except Used Goods) Trucking, Local."
The number of professionals in the equine transport industry could not be determined as well from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) site. The industry-specific occupational employment estimates in the site cover industries that are broader than the equine transport industry.
Given these observations about the NAICS code of equine transport and the BLS' industry-specific occupational employment estimates, I decided to look for company databases instead. Hoovers, Find The Company, and LinkedIn all have search and filter features, but, among these three sites, Hoovers appeared to be the most feasible option. Even though companies can be filtered by country and employment range in both the Hoovers and Find The Company databases, Hoovers does a better job of filtering companies by search terms or keywords. Companies in LinkedIn could not be filtered by employment range.
To find the number of companies in the United States equine transport industry, I performed two sets of searches in Hoovers' Company Search facility. One is for horse transport, and the other is for equine transport. To the results of each search, I applied the following filters:
1. Location = United States
2. Location Type = Headquarters or Single Location (Branches were excluded.)
3. #Employee = 0-4, 5-10, 11-49, and so on
After checking the resulting companies and counting only those that are clearly equine transport companies, I was able to arrive at the following numbers:
Estimated number of horse transport companies — 76
Estimated number of horse transport companies with 0-4 employees — 72
Estimated number of horse transport companies with 5-10 employees — 3
Estimated number of horse transport companies with 11-49 employees — 1
Estimated number of equine transport companies — 38
Estimated number of equine transport companies with 0-4 employees — 38
You may see the screenshots of my searches in the attached "Hoovers — Screenshots" document. Overall, there are at least 114 horse/equine transport companies in the Hoovers' database. Of these 114 horse/equine transport companies, 110 have no more than four employees. If we consider the highest value in each employment range, we can compute that the total number of employees in these 114 companies is at most 519 as shown below.
(110 x 4) + (3 x 10) + (1 x 49) = 519
It is important to note, though, that not all companies in the United States are listed in the Hoovers' database. To check how complete the database is, I looked for the actual number of firms in the country in the United States Census Bureau's American Fact Finder Guided Search facility.
As you may see in the attached "American Fact Finder — Screenshots" document, there were 5,531,169 employer firms and 24,331,403 non-employer firms in the United States in 2015. This means that, in said year, there were 29,862,572 firms in the country.
From the Hoovers' database and the "Hoovers — Screenshots" document, on the other hand, the following numbers can be gathered:
United States, headquarters: 449,557
United States, single locations: 15,169,633
It appears from these numbers that there are 15,619,190 companies listed in the Hoovers' database, only 52.3% of the actual number of companies in the United States in 2015.
Since only around half of companies in the United States are included in the database, the numbers we got from the Hoovers' database — that is, 114 companies and at most 519 professionals — may not be accurate. Though there is a good chance that the actual numbers are much higher, we cannot safely assume that the actual numbers are twice as big as 114 and 519.
CONCLUSION
To summarize, the number of professionals and the number of companies in the United States' equine transport industry are not readily available and could not be triangulated given the very limited information on the subject. I determined, however, that the Hoovers' company database contains at least 114 equine transport companies whose combined number of employees could be 519 at most. Only about half of companies in the United States are included in the Hoovers' database, however, so it is likely that the number of employees and the number of companies are greater than 114 and 519, respectively.