The Flip Side

I’ve had a lot of happy endings lately, but over the past couple of months I’ve also gotten a lot of calls from people that have been pretty darned depressing.  Horses starving, abandoned, financial troubles for otherwise good owners, or horses that just aren’t wanted anymore.  There’s only so much I can do so there have been a lot of disappointments.  For instance, I had a guy contact me from VA wanting me to come pick up his two twenty-something geldings because they were getting too old for him to use.   An eight hour drive one way to pick up your two horses that have served you for years, simply because they’re getting old and you’re too cheap to pay for retirement board?  When I told him that I couldn’t possibly drive that far for his horses and gave him another rescue to try that was more local to him, he became irate and made the comment that he doubted there were any “true” rescues left.

*sigh*

 

Then there’s this horse down in the Beckley area that’s thin, wormy, and living in a trash pit.

 

The authorities won’t lift a finger and PETA can’t step in because the horse isn’t quite thin enough yet.   There is no animal control in that county.  There’s supposed to be another horse in there with him, but I only saw this one when I did a drive by.  The  person that called me about these horses is keeping an eye on them and will send me pictures if they get worse.   Maybe we’ll be able to get them both out of there at some point.

 

And then there was a call the other night from a lady, Betty, down in the Beckley area who had found two horses tied to trees on an abandoned farm not far from her house.  Betty knows the owners of the horses and said they had been suspected of stealing horses before and riding them into the ground then making them disappear.  She called the authorities, but of course, they won’t do anything.  So what?  It’s just a living, breathing horse that feels pain, thirst, and hunger.  Why bother?  The horses have been there for at least two weeks and the woman and her friends have been keeping them fed and watered. 

I made a call to Stephanie, the woman that adopted Marbles, and she called a friend of hers with a truck and trailer.   Stephanie hooked up with Betty and was going to pick the horses up yesterday.   At the last minute, Betty called Stephanie to say the owners had decided to keep the horses and just gave them a longer rope.

UGH. 

 

I get home the other night to a note stuck to my door from a woman wanting me to take her nine year old stallion because he has a heart murmur and is losing weight.  Here’s an idea… GELD HIM.  If the heart murmur is so bad that he can’t hold weight, don’t make him suffer and just put him down.

 

Locally, there’s this little girl and her mini buddies (who are both studs).  The big fat redneck guy actually bragged about trying to ride that tiny, wormy, ragged little mini stud and getting bucked off.  Good for the mini!  There’s even rumor that the even fatter wife tried riding the filly at a year old!

   

 

The owners wanted $200 for the filly because apparently they know absolutely NOTHING about the current horse market.  You can pick up fillies like this at the local stock auction for 30 bucks.  Another local rescue intervened after I took these pictures and the authorities were called.  After a not so pleasant visit from a deputy, the owners decided to relinquish ownership of the filly to the other rescue.  I was called in to transport and the filly ended up going to a beautiful farm not far from here to recover.  Unfortunately, the minis are still with these idiots.

 

Lastly, there is another farm just a few miles down the road from me that has 17 horses, most of them malnourished and terribly thin.  This place is also in Tyler county (where Ellie and the filly above came from) so there is no animal control – only a deputy that seizes horses for his own breeding program.   Several of us have have befriended the woman who owns the horses in an attempt to educate her and make her see how bad her horses really are.  

Neither of them have jobs right now and her son is black.  In this backwoods part of the country racism runs high and he’s going to have a heck of a time finding a decent job.  I don’t even think she is looking for a job and it’s just the two of them.

A couple of months ago the horses were thin, but still looked better than they do now.  If things don’t improve, just imagine what they’ll look like come Winter.  They have no shelter and only very small paddocks (most are only 30-50’ long and wide, some smaller than that).  Misfire’s adopter traded me 150 square bales of hay for an adoption fee and I took most of it over to her, and I’ve offered to employee her son here on the farm part time starting in a few weeks.  But what else can you do when someone doesn’t think that they even need help??

 

I suppose I’m sharing all of this with you because I didn’t want everyone to think that rescuing always ends up with a case of the warm fuzzies.   There are more than enough heart breaks and disappointments, not to mention the loads of frustration and anger that can turn a person gray over night.   All we can do is keep going, plowing through the sea of moronic and uncaring owners, hoping to help as many horses as we can. 

Too bad it isn’t enough.