High cost of hay, grain affects all horses

Hard times nip at horse owners, too [link]

JENN WIANT | July 9, 2008

The increasing costs of food and fuel are forcing McHenry County residents to cut back on extraneous expenses to make ends meet. For Christy Bourbonnais of Harvard, rising food costs also are affecting her business.

Bourbonnais owns Cripple Creek Ranch at 23215 Graf Road, where she gives riding lessons, boards and trains horses, and prepares to show some of her own 10 horses.

But feeding the animals is becoming more difficult all of the time.

A bale of hay, enough to feed a large horse for a day, cost $1.50 or $2 a couple of years ago, said Jennifer Finkelman, co-founder of Destination: Safe Haven Horse Rescue in Marengo.

Now a bale can cost between $4 and $6, she said.

With the increase in fuel costs directly affecting the cost of hay, early season rains putting off the first hay cutting, and more farmers choosing to grow corn for ethanol instead of hay, the cost of horse feed has increased dramatically. As a result, more horse owners are resorting to selling their horses, giving them to rescue shelters, or abandoning them.

Donna Ewing, founder of Hooved Animal Rescue and Protection Society, or HARPS, in Barrington Hills, said she has had to turn away dozens of horse owners who have asked her to take their horses because they no longer can afford to keep them.

“I’m getting calls from Iowa, Wisconsin, where whole herds are starving,” Ewing said. “Our pastures our overloaded; our stalls are filled.”

Nationally, the Bureau of Land Management is considering euthanizing some of the wild horses that it cannot adopt out or afford to feed, BLM spokeswoman Karen Roberts said.

The BLM estimates that about 33,000 wild horses and burros roam their managed rangelands in 10 Western states, about 5,700 more than they believe the land can support. They remove thousands of horses and burros from the lands each year to keep the population in check, but with costs to feed the animals increasing and the number of adoptions declining, they are now considering other measures, Roberts said.

Ewing said the most humane option for many of the horses that could not be adopted was to euthanize them. But even that can cost about $400, she said, so the horses instead are abandoned or sold to someone who will transport them to Canada or Mexico to have them slaughtered. The last slaughterhouse in the United States, in DeKalb, closed in September.

Edeltraud Crabb of the Hooved Animal Humane Society in Woodstock said she would prefer that the BLM neuter the horses and release them.

Bourbonnais said she had decided to sell two of the horses she used to give lessons for financial reasons. She said she also might sell two ponies that she couldn’t afford to feed and train, even though they would be worth more if they were trained.

Older horses and very young horses are the most difficult to adopt out, Ewing said. The older horses require a more expensive feed, and the younger horses have to be trained, she explained.

“Not many people are willing to take them on as just a companion horse because of the economy and because of the horrific cost of feed,” she said.

For those owners who cannot afford to keep their horses, she asks them to be proactive rather than selling them for slaughter or abandoning them.

“If these animals have served them well, they’re going to have to pay to put them down or go to all their friends who can afford them and beg them to take them until things get better,” she said.

XP—When rescues are full and euthanasia is not affordable, what other options are available?