Think long and hard !
Colorado Horse Rescue Network
So you think it's safe to rehome your old horse? Nearly every emaciated senior we get eventually has a previous owner contact us just shocked at how their horse ended up. They gave their senior away to a loving home with kids. Now a year or two later it's fighting for it's life from neglect and starvation.
Truth is, the safest place for your old horse is with you. Period. Can't keep it for whatever reason? PUT IT DOWN. Save it a slow miserable death with strangers. And yes, the slow starvation of an old horse is painful and cruel. This isn't your great aunt in a nursing home with medical care and medication, this is a horse who's eventually going to start breaking down it's own organs just to stay alive. It's not pretty, and it's not natural. In the wild it would be killed by predators or a storm long before it's heart stopped. It never fails, every day someone sends me a listing for an old horse with "lots of life left". You know how many seniors I find great forever homes for? Not very many. Everyone wants a horse under 20. And the ones willing to take a senior are often shocked at the cost to maintain a horse over 25. All I see when I look at those listings is a walking skeletonat at a sale barn or a sheriff calling me about an emaciated old horse someone doesn't want in the next 12 to 24 months. Stop kidding yourselves that someone is going up care for your old horse. 9 times out of 10 they won't. Let it die fat, happy, safe, and with YOU.
Bernadette was a free kid's horse, given away. Turned out well right? Moses was at a gymkhana last summer doing leadline, his owner a self professed trainer and rescuer. Again story book ending. Lily, a champion endurance horse given to a family for a special needs boy... came to us 2 years later a bcs of 1 and was said to be blind and crazy (she was neither). I can go on... twenty stories come to mind. Even an old horse we offered to take, who's owner sent it instead to a kid's camp in the mountains... we didn't get that one in time she died the day we picked her up. Owner was shocked. How could this happen? Well it happened because you gave away your old horse. So stop it. Right now. Can't afford to put it down? Call me. We will help.
But for the sake of your horse, don't give your old horses away!
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