So firstly total of 3 horses now missing from my trying things in game to trigger spawn. Started I took my horse to another players res cuz heard some guys were going to race abit, rode around abit then dismounted and went to look around assuming my horse would find his way home. This was my currently best horse brown with diamond armour good speed jump and hp (128 - 92% - 24 don't remember the .# numbers), so I waited till next day to log in again see if he showed up, no luck. Once I remembered the name of guys res I had been at I teleported back and forth there a bunch, before grabbing the other horse I had on my res (my second best for breeding). Brought that horse over and dismounted then stared at it for the 5 minutes until it teleported away, jumped back to my res and realised I should probably have used a worse horse and taken the armour and saddle of it cuz it wasn't home, again tried logging and teleporting about to no avail. after a while I decided to use the hindsight from that second loss and took a much less valuable horse out of storage, got it over to res took gear of it and teleported home, figured I would wait the five minutes in my res this time, long story short (a little shorter anyway) no luck and a third albeit much less painful horse loss. so any suggestions? reassurances? things I can do?
First of all: when you're offline and no players are active around your residence then little will happen there. Sometimes it takes a while for a horse to re-surface again. So if you log off, then the delay will remain. Which is basically my suggestion: make sure you checked your residence thoroughly (even hidden locations) and if the horse isn't there then try waiting it out a little bit. I've helped a few players search for their animals before and up until now the results were always the same: eventually the animal appeared again.
To date still no sign of lost horses, so to other people out there, don't trust the return home teleport. Thanks to some help from other guys on my server and some hunting I have some fast horses again but nothing yet with the combined awesome of my one lost horse.
