Rehoming the herd
Finding places for my horses was one of the most anxiety-ridden tasks of my move
I had started investigating avenues for rehoming my horses in the spring, but the effort went into high gear in June once the property sales agreement was signed. After the loss of my “heart horse” Chuy last September, the herd was now three:
Glory, a golden boy I named after Glorfindel (IYKYK), is a retired West Texas ranch horse who is pushing 30. I don’t know a lot about his history, but seeing the massive scar on a back leg I inferred that he was booted from the ranch as he could no longer do his job. I don’t know how many owners’ hands he’d passed through before he came to me in 2013, but even though I discovered he was unrideable (I’d bought him as a well-trained riding horse) due to his injury, I kept him to allow him some peace.
Peppermint Patty is a big beautiful paint mare with awesome bloodlines. She’d gotten solid training in her youth, but I’d only ridden her a few times since coming to me in 2011. One reason was that she had high anxiety riding out in the open (as opposed to an arena or round pen) and was more reactive than I could manage. The other was that I gave up riding once Chuy became unrideable due to illness.
Annie is a lovely Quarter Horse, also with great bloodlines, that I got when she was a year and a half old, 10 years ago. By the time she was ready to start under saddle, I had stopped riding, and even if I hadn’t I didn’t have the knowledge to train her nor the money to hire a trainer. So she spent the first 11.5 years of her life just being a horse and I worked with her from the ground from time to time. She is smart and I knew she was being wasted with me…though it took my contemplated move to make me ready to let her go.
I was anxious about rehoming them. Glory could only ever be a “pasture ornament,” and the likelihood that someone would want him was slim. Patty and Annie both had value to the right riders, but too many “horse people” treat the animals like vehicles—to be gotten rid of once their usefulness was over. And though I had a pleasant daydream of Annie being owned by a teenage girl who competed with her, I know that often teenage girls lose interest in horses as they get older. I couldn’t bear the thought of any of the three ending up at auction (a terrible experience with some pretty awful people in attendance) and possibly being carted off to the slaughterhouse. So the idea of offering them for sale was very troubling.
Rehoming them through a non-profit horse rescue organization seemed the best bet. I would need to surrender them to the rescue and then the rescue would place each with a foster and work on finding an adopter. All rescues are not created equally, however—there are some that are just backyard herds kept in okay but not great circumstances. And with the economy in flux, many of those backyard rescuers were dealing with dwindling resources and an increasing number of surrender requests.
I turned to the one rescue that I knew was an excellent organization: Bluebonnet Equine Humane Society. They have an excellent reputation, and I knew that surrendering my horses to them would give my herd the best chance of living out their lives away from the shadows of auction and slaughterhouse. I researched their adoption policies and saw that they screen potential adopters carefully. They also required adopters to return an animal to them if conditions make keeping it impossible.
I put together a packet of information about each horse and attached it to an email to Bluebonnet.
And waited….
I can’t wait for the next installment! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻🤓