17/02/2024
This is the best and kindest thing you can do for your equine friend if you can no longer care for them yourself.
There is NO excuse for dumping your old or non-ridable horse at auction, or giving it away because you don't want to make that hard decision. Both of those are acts of a coward.
If you say you're getting rid of your horse because you want a horse you can ride and your current horse is no longer ridable, you don't deserve ANY horse and you just suck.
Once the horse leaves your care, there are no guarantees it will receive proper care. Odds are really good it will wind up on a cattle truck to Mexico. If it survives that miserable ride, it will soon meet an unpleasant death.
There are fates worse than death. Put your horse down with kindness and spare them one of those fates.
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but if you need permission, you have mine.
Put them down.
That old horse that can’t always get up on their own, or keep weight on despite your best effort, you may put them down.
The horse that was diagnosed with all the aweful acronyms, and will never be comfortable- it’s okay to put them down.
You’ve spent thousands of dollars trying to get that horse sound. It’s young, “well bred”, and you thought you would be working on straightness in the flying changes by now, not yet more imaging. You can’t afford another horse, and you can’t sell a lame one. You can maybe sorta keep them pasture sound and comfortable with $300 shoes and another $300/month in supplements and add complimentary therapies on top…. It’s financially destroying you. Just stop.
If anyone disagrees with me, or you can put a post on their own darn page, and stay out of my comment section, but I do not believe it is some moral obligation to absolutely destroy yourself, financially and emotionally, too keep a broken horse alive and comfortable.
Don’t get me wrong, I have a lot of aging horses on my farm and they are all healthy and happy and my plans are for them to be here until the end. But horses don’t just die peacefully in their sleep one night. Not usually. All too often their deaths are traumatic and awful.  Sure I would love if my old heart horse out there beat the odds and is one of the few horses to just lay down and peacefully cross over, but I am absolutely not counting on that… so he has  it to count on me to not wait too long.
For those of you who can’t bring yourself to make that decision without some kind of permission, I grant you mine. If you love that horse, but think it might be the end, I trust that you did not come to that decision lightly. If in your heart, you know, it’s time, please let them go.
