State of the horse people's horses, EoY 2023

[which_chick]

When the year started, there were "about 22". And the year has run its course and we're at "about 18".



Martini (black)= 1
High Tide, Sailor (pintos) = 2. (Saguaro went to Cass's, on loan for her daughter, but will probably stay there for the duration.)

Elklin (buckskin) = 1.
Bird (mine), Chantilly, Vamp (grays) = 3

Oasis, Peake, Tank, Genie, Snap, Switch, Beretta, Moon Rhea, Nope, and Finn (mine) (bays) = 10 (Ceres died, Keystone went over to Theron's to replace Taku who died.)

(Punch died.)

Casper (chocolate silver) = 1

From 22 to 18. Headway. Sad and depressing headway but important and necessary headway because Lala's mom owns most of these horses and she is 77. The number of horses needs to be significantly lower, yet still, because the owner of most of the horses is 77. Her adult children do not need/want this many horses on the property. My two pay rent, but the others do not.

Recall, there used to be 75. Eighteen is way better than seventy-five. This is progress, it really is.

Martini and Elklin are old enough that the sand in their glasses is getting thin. Martini's still in pretty good shape and moves OK and seems cheerful about life, but Elklin moves like an old lady and is wadding grass and just looks... bad. Not just ribby but... unhappy. She doesn't have enough teeth to eat grass and is subsisting on pelleted feed. She doesn't look good and I don't think she feels good and if she'd been my horse, she'd not be staring down the barrel of December. She is not my horse and I hope she lasts until the ground thaws out in spring.

Comments

[adafrog]

Progress.

[sunshine304]

Whoa, 16 horses to one rather old owner is… sure something. So, IDK the history, did she breed them? Or is it like some kind of horse sanctuary thing? Or does she simply like to collect horses and has money to burn...?

Where I’ve got my horse-share, there’s only ten stables available anyway. One is for my friend’s horse, the others are all different owners, though there’s three people with two horses each. We had to say goodbye to Lisa this year; she was in her late 20s and had declined quite a lot throughout the year, gotten really thin since she couldn’t chew her hay anymore but also refused to eat the mash or soft haycobs… She’d always been a very stubborn horse!
Her owner had decided to give her this last summer and then put an end to it before the paddock time started again this year and the weather got bad. That definitely was the right decision. It’s always difficult to let a beloved animal go, and horses can get so old. But we used to have one horse there that should’ve seen his end about three years earlier… but the owner just couldn’t let him go and was like, “he still looks so lively when he gets his food!” Well, yeah, that is basically the only time of day he looks lively… He couldn’t walk right anymore, if he lay down he often couldn’t get up without help etc. Serious case of the owner being completely blind to the reality. Really not a fan of that woman...

[which_chick]

She used to raise and sell horses. There is (lol) no money to burn, it's an aging ex-dairy-farm that the family owns. There is a plan here and there will be a reasonable number of horses (maybe six, for three people who ride regularly) but we're trying to not... dump any horse at auction, not ditch horses to homes without supervision (because that generally doesn't go well), or put down any horse capable of living comfortably and reasonably happily. So it's taking a while and we are counting on the attrition of time to take care of a lot of what's left. I know that sixteen sounds like a lot. I do know this. However, we are doing our best to dig out of the seventy-five-horses hole that existed in around the year 2000. It's going pretty well, but this is twenty years in and we are not done yet. It's a long-term project.

[sunshine304]

Oh god, yeah that sounds like a huge project! And I totally can understand that you'd not want to get rid of the horses any way possible (because that's not all that difficult) but want them to get a good new home. And of course, the older the horse, the harder it is to sell it anyway, as no-one wants to buy a horse that might start having health problems because of its age soon.