Zero Tolerance for Failure

This week we had an older horse trainer visit. He has obviously been a student of horsemanship for many many years and has been raising quarter-horses for sixty-four of them. He had been paying attention to the culture of horsemen in the Four Corners area  for most of his life and had many fascinating stories to tell. Many stories were about horses bought from or sold at the sale barn auction house. 

In the horse business, the animals are an asset to be managed for revenue generation. A horse enterprise has to dump the ones that are losing propositions because they take up the same amount of resources a more valuable animal would need. If they can sell the animal to someone they know can make something of it, well, that is one thing, but maybe it would be in their interests to sell these losers to a stranger without revealing the reasons they are shedding this particular animal. That is the value of the sale barn auction. They don't have to mention the animal's faults. The animal will probably be loaded onto a kill buyers truck headed to Mexico. The old man called them "trash horses" as if they just needed disposal. 

I instantly wondered how many of the animals on my lot would he consider trash. It is true that they have very little potential to generate any revenue. They eat the same amount as a Kentucky Derby winner. I could be mucking the same poo from behind a stable full of papered broodmares and their precious colts and fillies. But here I am with twenty-some hay-burners, a dozen of which I hope to get adopted for a token price of $125.

We don't allow ourselves the easy-out of taking them to the sale barn. We don't decide they are going to take too long to train. We have zero tolerance for training failure. There is no such thing as giving up on a healthy animal in my world. The only trash horse is a dead horse.

Rescues generally have zero-tolerance for failure, though the major rescue funding organization in the USA, the Right Horse Initiative, is pushing the policy of euthanasia for horses unlikely to be rehomed. Their motto is "Good horses for Good People" and you can't blame them for not wanting to invest their funding in the less good (trash) horses. When a big funder mandates a policy, it is bound to have an effect on the culture of horse rescues.

 In contrast, any equine welfare organization that takes a whole wild equine gather, such as the National Mustang Association of Colorado is doing with the Mesa Verde National Park horses, or we did when we used to take all the USFS horses gathered from the Jicarilla Ranger District, must have a zero tolerance for failure. Every horse will get trained sufficiently to be cared for by humans. Humans are not giving them the option of taking care of themselves anymore, so we owe it to them to teach them the behaviors needed for basic husbandry. It doesn't matter how old or homely they might be, they need help to transition to a domestic life.

The old man asked if I would let him finish the hoof-care training on a horse he wanted to adopt. "No," was my answer, "I can never give an adopter a reason not to give the animal the care that it needs." It's a policy, not a comment on his abilities. The adoption period and our open-door return policy hopefully keeps our animals from ever heading to the sale barn.