Unwanted Horse Survey Seeks Your Input

(Received via press release)

The problem of unwanted horses in the United States is being studied through a nationwide initiative of the Unwanted Horse Coalition (UHC) with help from equine associations, veterinarians, breeders, state and local law enforcement, horse owners, rescue/retirement facilities, and other facilities using horses. The first step is an online survey — and everyone with an interest in the welfare of horses is encouraged to respond at http://survey.ictgroup.com/uhcsurvey/.

With tens of thousands of unwanted, neglected and abandoned horses in the United States, some say the problem is a fast-growing epidemic. However, much remains unknown. Currently, there are few documented facts about the accurate number of unwanted horses, their age, sex, breed, recent use, value or what happens to them in the long run.

“Although there are numerous media reports and much anecdotal evidence of a growing problem with unwanted horses, there have been no studies or surveys done to attempt to document it,” said Jay Hickey, president of the American Horse Council (AHC), the national association that represents all segments of the horse industry in Washington, D.C. The UHC operates with the AHC. “The downturn in the economy, rising costs of hay, the drought that has affected many parts of the United States, the costs of euthanasia and carcass disposal, and the closing of the nation’s slaughter facilities have all made the problem worse. But no one knows its magnitude. That’s why the first step toward a solution is to gather and examine the facts. The goal of this survey is to get the input, observations, opinions and suggestions from anyone and everyone involved with horses.”

The Study on Contributing Factors Surrounding the Unwanted Horse Issue will be instrumental in filling factual gaps with actual data on:
-- Awareness of the unwanted horse problem and perceived trends in recent years
-- Level of concern
-- Factors contributing to the problem
-- Direct and in-direct experience with the issue
-- Actions taken by owners
-- Expectations about responsibility and assistance
-- Solutions

Phase I of the study is an online survey of people most affected by and involved with the issue of the unwanted horse. An independent research firm developed the questionnaire. The firm will also tabulate and analyze responses, and provide a full report.

A comprehensive view of the problem depends on representation from all corners of the horse industry, according to Dr. Tom Lenz, chairman of the UHC. “To ensure the broadest possible participation, we’re working to involve a variety of individuals, associations, state and local agencies, and equine-related companies to actively encourage their constituencies to take the survey and voice their opinions.

“Regardless of how horses reached this state, every owner—and the equine industry at large—has a responsibility to ensure that everything possible is done to guarantee the humane care and treatment of unwanted horses,” Lenz said.

Opinion: Why the Slaughter Transport Bill Is Not Enough (and Ten Steps Toward Healing the Ideology Split)

Horse carcasses hang in the cooler at Nature Valley Farms in Saskatchewan. Photo from the No Country for Horses documentary produced by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

The House Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday favorably passed proposed legislation to ban the slaughter of American horses for human consumption overseas, as well as the export of American horses to other countries for slaughter. House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) introduced the bill, H.R. 6598, known as the Conyers-Burton Prevention of Equine Cruelty Act of 2008.

This bill is still a long way from passing into law. It still must be passed by a majority vote of the Representatives, and the Senate must do the same.

The legislation is being opposed by the AVMA, AQHA, and AAEP. These organizations have dug in their heels on the issue of slaughter, or (more precisely) government intervention on the slaughter of animals for meat. I truly don't believe that anyone in those organizations wants to defend the stuffing of dozens of horses into double-decker trailers for long, hot journeys to Mexican slaughterhouses, but politics is forcing them into just that.

This issue continues to split the horse world the same way that abortion is the hot-button issue in the larger political scene. I think we should look at that issue as a model of how derisive an issue can be and work for solutions that prevent further splits and animosity in the horse world.

One thing I know is true: A workable solution will probably never come from a regulation crafted by legislators and lawyers in Washington. But Washington could force the horse industry into a new era of self-awareness and responsibility.

To better understand horse slaughter as a hot-button issue, keep your eye on abortion debates and on the somewhat related issue of puppy mills. Watch how the government is handling both those issues (or not handling them).

Some solutions I support or propose:

1. If the AQHA is against slaughter, it should discourage its members from breeding. Declare a moritorium for one year, say 2010. Close the book on new foal registrations temporarily. Educate owners and breeders that this is for the good of the breed and the US horse market. Supporting both slaughter as a disposal method and breeding as a means to set new registration records is not in the best interest of horse welfare.

2. If the AVMA and AAEP are against slaughter, they should begin massive owner education programs to discourage breeding, particularly of sub-standard mares. Vet clinics should also offer a period during their natural slow seasons twice each year to offer discounted euthanasia and castration services. Vets make money on breeding and foaling, so a simple equation is that more horses owned by fewer clients are good for a clinic's bottom line. A shift in emphasis needs to made to wellness care and preventive medicine for existing horses rather than creating more horses. Vets should begin to offer decision-making seminars or ethical counseling for mare owners. If clients can't pay their bills, should they be breeding more horses?

3. If the humane and welfare organizations are against slaughter, they should work on massive owner education programs to discourage owning a stallion and they should work with the AVMA and AAEP to offer discounted castrations for cash-strapped clients the same way they offered spay/neuter services for dogs and cats.

4. Breed organizations should follow the model used in Europe so that only approved stallions breed mares. Saying that a stud is (for instance) a registered Paint is no guarantee that the stud is a quality animal worthy of passing on its genes. Likewise, the sale of stud colt weanlings and yearlings should be discouraged. Castrate them first.

5. If the US government wants to regulate horse affairs, it can look to taxation of breeding stock. If you want to breed your mare, perhaps a fee needs to be paid that will support some of the many thousands of unwanted horses. Breeding a mare should be a privilege. The government might also look at a moratorium or higher tax on imported horses, particularly mares and stallions, while there is a glut of unwanted horses here. At the same time, ownership of affordable pleasure (non-breeding) horses could be a tax credit, linked to open land preservation.

6. Find an alternative to the bottom rung auctions. The "meat buyers" should keep a database of the horses they acquire and who owned and bred them. At the very least, we should know breed, sex, and age. Make that information public. If 50 percent of slaughter-bound horses are a certain breed, wouldn't that information have be a call to action for a breed registry to reduce new registrations and discourage breeding until over-production stabilizes?

7. The USTA and Jockey Club need to keep track of ex-racehorses. Owners who abandon their horses and do not provide for their retirement should be embarrassed. If an owner stands in a winner's circle accepting a check while last year's campaigner stands in an auction pen, the public should know. If the high bidder at Keeneland sent 50 horses to slaughter last year, it should be known. The racing/betting fan base should know MUCH more about how owners dispose of or provide for their retired stock. Syndicates and partnerships should have a policy about what they do with non-racing stock that is part of their offering. Those who do (and who stick to it) should get publicity for it.

8. Retirement farms and rescue centers should not differentiate between past winners and "just horses". Encouraging donations or adoptions only because a horse has an impressive show or race record is a slippery slope. A horse that has won for its owner should never end up in a retirement or rescue farm, unless the horse arrives with a big donation check. Prospective adopters should not be interested in a horse only because it was a winner.

9. Horse publications should report more objectively on the issues of slaughter and over-breeding and end their cash-cow stallion issues, effective in 2009. Many are not serving their readers by presenting balanced reporting; some are not reporting on this issue at all. They should also discontinue their "bringing up baby" issues that encourage the creation of more cute foals. People who say they are against slaughter need to pressure publishers into more pro-active roles in educating mare and stallion owners about responsible breeding. If a publication persists in encouraging breeding, readers can cancel subscriptions. Cancel event, farm services and other non-breeding ads. Write letters to the editor. Write another one. These steps will get their attention. (Note: I know that Horse Illustrated has already discontinued its breeding edition for this reason; hopefully other publications have as well.) Editors should be advocates for the reader's information needs. A publication that is dependent on stallion ads for revenue needs to balance that reality.

10. Throughout the industry: Create a culture of public information about horse breeders and stallion get. We need more "where are they now" information but also statistics on how breeders of show and race horses dispose of their lower quality weanlings and yearlings and two-year-olds. Report on the number of show and race horses imported into the US each year. Create a culture of peer pressure among horse owners. Give more prizes at shows to horses who are born and bred in the USA and who were rescued, retrained from racing or rehabilitated. Monitor dog and cat breed/show issues and learn from them (and their mistakes). Encourage veterinary research programs and product development that will help injured or older horses rather than funding more research aimed at getting more mares in foal or increasing fertility of past-peak stallions.

And then, encourage everyone you know to get involved in horses or financially adopt a needy horse at a rescue farm. Encourage the press to publicize the work that is being done to help horses, on both sides of the slaughter fence. Re-invent horse ownership as something fun and meaningful to do in life. Become an ambassador for horses.

11. Tear down the fence and let's all go for a ride. Together.

If you like this post, you will also like these three favorite posts recommended by The Jurga Report:
A link to the excellent Retraining of Racehorses video;
The No Country for a Horse documentary;
Admitting There's a "YOU" in Fugly.

© 2008 by Fran Jurga, The Jurga Report: Horse Health Headlines and Equisearch.com. All rights reserved.
http://special.equisearch.com/blog/horsehealth/

This post originally appeared on The Jurga Report on September 24, 2008.

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Admitting there's a "YOU" in "Fugly": Unwanted Horse Coalition Meets in Washington; Free Download of Summary

Who's Fugly today? Fugly Horse of the Day is a blog that delivers a swift kick to the sensitive parts of the horse world. Anyone who thinks he or she is insulated from charges of cruel or questionable practices should think again; this web site has its camera lens focused on all of us. This video is a montage of photos from the blog. If you don't believe there are horses in need in the USA, just click on the "play" icon. "FHOTD" features a few stunners every day, and the blogger never seems to run out of horses. While her anger is apparent, it is a deadeye aim at humans. Humans make a horse Fugly, just because humans make horses, often for all the wrong reasons. (Images in video are direct from YouTube and attributed without explanation by FHOTD; you would have to go through the blog to read each photo's story.)

Many people in the horse world think that all this "unwanted horse" business does not apply to them. It's someone else's problem.

Make that everyone else's problem.


The way I think of it is: If you know that every horse you have owned in your life ended his or her life in the care of a concerned human (preferably yours), maybe you have a clear conscience. But for many of us who have sold a horse on and don't know how its life ended, there is always that little wisp of a cloud of doubt.

Could one of those horses in one of those videos have been your Misty, your Dusty, your Snowball, your Frosty, your Moose, or even my Skeeter?

We hate to think about it, but we have to. And we have to do a lot more than think about it. We have to do something about it.

This week in Washington DC, the American Horse Council and the US Department of Agriculture presented a full day's forum on the status of unwanted horses in our country. The report is slim, and grim. Full of things we already know, questions we have already asked, but the fact that people at the top of the decision-making and influence-peddling heap are paying attention is a ray of hope in a cloud-filled sky.

What can you or I do? Dr. Tom Lenz, representing the American Association of Equine Practitioners, summed it up for me: “Buy rather then breed. Adopt rather than buy. Find alternative careers. Euthanize rather than discard.”

It's time for the AAEP and the AVMA to put that mantra to work. Every time a vet leaves a barn, a card should be left behind with that advice. Posters need to go up in feed stores and at showgrounds.

I know that veterinarians, feed stores, tack shops and yes, horse magazines and web sites, make a lot of money from horse breeding, whether it's selling foal halters or stallion ads or performing AI and ultrasounds on mares.

I saw a bumper sticker from the dog side of the world. It read something like: "DO NOT BREED....when so many are in need!" We need a lot of those printed up with horses on them instead of dogs.

Most days, I force myself to visit an unpleasant blog called "Fugly Horse of the Day" and recommend it to you too. I think "FHOTD" must be the most popular horse blog on the entire Internet. It is irreverent. It is cruel. It is downright nasty. It makes me cringe. But I keep going back, because it keeps going on.

Each day, the blogger finds and ridicules a horse-for-sale ad found on the Internet. Most feature poorly-conformed products of what has come to be called "backyard breeding". Other days she takes aim at trainers or show practices. Some posts show tiny children playing under the hooves of "unbelievably gentle" stallions that are for sale. Some horses are shown in barbed-wire prisons. Others are deparately thin or deformed. Shrill-sounding owners plea for someone to "rescue" their lame, exhausted bred-to-death older mares who can no longer produce. Grade "stud colts" who should have been gelded years ago strut their pathetic stuff and fall prey to the blogger's ridicule.

She (I assume the blogger is female, but I could be mistaken) coins new words for bad colored horses, such as "hideozygous". She can and will make each and every one of us flinch, sooner or later. For many, the graphic language and in-your-face style are too much. For others, it's refreshing that someone has finally taken off the rose-colored glasses and shown us the reality of the American horse-owning public.

What keeps me coming back to FHOTD is the perpetuity of it. She never runs out of bad horse ads. She never quavers from her mission. Each blog post has hundreds of responses from her readers. This tells me that there is an endless supply out there of these horses.

Around here, land may be too valuable for people to have horses they don't use (or can't use). The cost of keeping a horse may too high for there to be too many field-bred accidents born each year, but I know there are some. And there are people everywhere who ride horses with ill-fitting tack, or do just plain dumb things (sometimes by accident). Horses get hurt because of owner ignorance regardless of zip code or boarding costs per month. And hurt horses in the unwanted pipeline go down quickly, until they end up on a trailer bound for Mexico or Canada, a long, long way from the green pastures that older horses romp through in fairy tales.

We invite you to download this article (see link below) on the unwanted horses meeting and read it. Get informed with these basic facts and then figure out where you're going to start to lend a hand. You can begin today, with a donation of time or cash to responsible horse rescue groups and sanctuaries who are hard at work trying to turn unwanted horses into wanted ones.

I hope your first pony lived out its days under the apple tree with Black Beauty and Ginger. That's the way it's supposed to be, but Fugly reality is haunting me. How about you?

AHC-USDAUnwantedHorsesFile.pdf