“A lot of people give up on horses, just because of an injury or old age or no matter what it might be, but an animal’s not done ‘til they’re done. You might not win all the races, but you need to let an animal do what they’ve got to do.”
A dark bay, nearly black, with a dramatic white blaze on her forehead, everyone thought Burma — the diva of the barn — was a beauty.
But, though friendly and affectionate, the 6-year-old thoroughbred was practically impossible to handle. High-strung and feisty, she swayed impatiently in her stall, chewed the wooden doors, got tangled in her harness, stuck her nose into any box or bucket she could find. She had proved hopeless on the track, despite having a distant blood connection to the great racehorse Man o’ War. She had ugly feet that required special shoes, and an alarming tendency to colic.
To 16-year-old Megan Chance, she was perfect.
As part of my less formal education I attended a course from HSUS called “First Strike – The Violence Connection.” While the material presented was shocking, the conclusion fits like a glove onto every scenario of animal abuse and neglect that I’ve witnessed. The bottom line is that when you see a person who is guilty of animal abuse, you are also looking at a person who has no problem beating the hell out of another human. Animal abuse is a proven predictor of violent behavior.
HOUSTON – There’s help for horses this week and a bit of relief for their owners during the record setting drought.
They’re getting a hay “bale out” from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The ASPCA announced today that a total of $250,000 is being granted to 24 equine welfare organizations and animal control agencies across Texas and Oklahoma.
Thus: (Trumpets play, choir sings, enter the dancers)
Habitat for Horses announces…. No adoption fees on ranch horses and donkeys!
For a limited time, Habitat for Horses is waiving all adoption fees for horses and donkeys adopted from the ranch. The requirements for adoption remain the same and there is still a $35 application fee, but there will be no adoption fees on our available ranch equine.
He came to us because our vet asked us to pick him up. Nothing unusual about the call – a horse down, unable to rise. We’re used to those calls, and the ranch crew responded quickly and with practiced perfection. In a short time the horse, a young gelding, was on the Emergency Glide at the barn as the crew started hooking him up to the Anderson Sling.
Beyond any doubt, there are those who know far more than I’ve even thought about in relation to the care of horses, but there are a few things that over the course of years of operating an equine rescue have become “rules of the road” in horse keeping.
Over the past several days a dreadful news story has broken about one of the largest Equine Rescues in the world, the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation, willfully and without explanation allowing the care of some 1,000+ horses deteriorate to the point of starvation and death. Well funded but grossly mismanaged the organization unraveled with the horses, who were promised a comfortable and painless retirement, getting the bitter short end of the stick.
Before I took a trip to the Habitat for Horses the morning of Jan. 29, my heart broke as I read about 500 to 700 malnourished horses on a foreclosed Montana ranch.
She didn’t know why she had not seen them before. She had driven by that little patch of pain for years and remembered seeing something up there, but she had never in her life seen what she saw on this day, never.
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