10/20/2025
I’ve been doing rescue work a long time, and as long as I’ve been doing it, I’ve heard complaints about rescues who ask for donations, about adoption fees, and about where money goes. Those questions are sometimes directed at us, sometimes at other rescues, and sometimes just at rescues together.
So today, let’s talk about the cost of rehabilitating and caring for horses at a rescue.
Most of our horses arrive without current veterinary care. Some of them haven’t ever seen a veterinarian while others haven’t seen one in years. This means we need to get a Coggins test and vaccinations fairly quickly, and if the horse is in decent shape we also need dental work. On average, that costs around $500 per horse. If the horse needs more than just routine dental care – say a tooth pulled or multiple visits due to lack of previous dental care, the cost can go up $500, $1,000 or even more.
Then we have hoof care. Many of our horses get to stay barefoot, so their farrier care is on average $350-$450 per year. (Using average price of $55 per trim, 6-8 trims per year).
We also give our foster homes a stipend to help pay the costs of hay and grain. That costs us about $1,200 for the first six months and then another $160 per month after that.
This means, if a horse comes in who does not have any behavioral problems that necessitate a trainer and doesn’t need shoes or corrective shoeing and doesn’t have any lamenesses, health, or dental problems, it costs about $1,900 to care for them for six months.
Of those horses adopted at this year’s Challenge, 16 actually were in the rescue less than six months, but most of those had been in the rescue around 4-5 months (so the cost was about $1,500-$1,700). Eight were in the rescue 6-8 months, 13 were in the rescue 8-12 months, 9 were in the rescue 1-2 years, and 5 were in the rescue over two years.
The math means just adoption fees don’t cover the cost of over 95% of our horses. To be fair, sometimes we do get a horse who comes to the rescue and is adopted pretty quickly. Their adoption fees are normally pretty low (or they may not have an adoption fee). But for the most part, adoption fees don’t come close to covering the costs.
And we do have horses we have to euthanize before they’re adopted. Plus the costs of feeding and caring for the horses aren’t the only expenses we have.
We do try to keep our adoption fees lower than you would pay for a similar horse if you bought one outright because we do place some restrictions on adopters.
Some folks also might say: you should never have a horse in the rescue longer than X amount of time. And in an ideal world, that’s true – we would get horses in and out quickly because then we could help more horses. That’s a temptation because there are always more horses we could help. But when we say yes to a horse, that’s a commitment from us. A commitment that the horse is safe and is going to get care and going to be part of Bluebonnet for the rest of their lives. Making that commitment is how I sleep at night, it is how I keep doing the hard work.
