When I was a little girl, I always dreamed of owning a horse..My grandad owned two horses. Monte and Jackie. Monte was a palomino, and Jackie was a bay. I still remember riding Monte as a tiny little girl. Jackie was reserved for only the ornery grandkids (like my brother) as she liked to act up. Grandad used to cart race, and my Dad would take me to races at the fair. I loved every minute of it. At home, my bicycle was a wild horse, running through wooded trails and jumping over obstacles. My notebook was full of drawings of horses and my bedroom full of grand champion toy horses instead of dolls… I was a horse crazed girl with no horse of my own!
That dream became a reality for me in 2018. I’ve always been one to research before I do something. I extensively researched how to maintain a fish tank as a teenager. I studied about what fish went together, and the correct temperature to keep the tank, and how to go about introducing new fish, about fish diseases and how to address them. I studied about birds, when we had pet birds…And now, I had a horse. There was studying to do. It was a learning process. Some days it still is.
Making a long story short, it took a couple tries to find the right horse for us. But we ended up with our sweet girl Lightning. And then we were on a mission to find our kids a good, broke pony. Let me tell you, good broke ponies are worth their weight in gold.
This lead me to do some more digging..and more research led us to a sale barn. We went with the intention of bringing home a pony, and maybe one horse. We came home with both. Spark, our kids’ best buddy, and a poor skinny palomino mare that Jonathan nick named Bomb. (Her name is now Wednesday, and she is back to health completely and doing wonderful with her home!)
The very first sale we went to, we saw the pens full outside, and then ventured into the barn and found out there were SO many MORE. I thought the outside pens were full, but the inside ones were so packed that a person could literally walk across the backs of the horses across three or four pens. How could so many horses possibly fit in one place? How could you even get to some of them to see what they were like? Some were so packed into the middle of the pens, there was no hope of any people being able to handle them. People stood on the fences looking over the crowd of horses to get a glimpse of what was there. There were horses of every color, most every breed… Beautiful paint horses, old, weathered standardbreds, OTTBs with racing plates still on, palominos, sorrels, blacks, buckskins…You could think it up, unless it was something truly rare and spectacular, it was likely there.
Chaos filled the atmosphere of the sale barn. If you’ve never been to a sale that has loose horses, it can be quite the emotional experience. Injured horses, healthy horses, beat up horses, emaciated horses, foundered horses, babies, mamas separated, ponies, donkeys, mules…There’s some of everything. The majority of these horses are not broken down, and ready to be thrown away. Some may need cleaned up (Ok, MOST), and need some simple farrier work, maybe a round of antibiotics and a vet exam. But they are full of LIFE.
When I was young and dreamed of owning a horse, this is not exactly what I dreamed of… But the day that we walked into the sale barn and experienced the kill pen auction…and experienced being in the back when the big beautiful black draft horse, and young horses, old horses, and ponies were all herded down a cattle shute into a semi truck headed for slaughter, my dream of ‘owning’ a horse, shifted to a dream of saving them. It was eye opening and heart shattering, to see them dumped off and so easily discarded.
We don’t have a big fancy ranch…We were not the most informed people in the horse industry…But we had a dream. When you dream of doing big things, all you have to do is put it to action. So we did…We started with a baby trailer that got made fun of..And then we saved up and worked out a deal and got a bigger trailer and fixed it up…Pretty soon, with the help of some fundraising, we were bringing home more with us each time. We started this amazing journey in September of 2019. Since then we have rescued, rehabbed, and rehomed (mostly!) a grand total of 19 directly from the sale. Plus another 8 that we have bought to keep OUT of the sale. That makes a grand total of 27 and counting…
A dream doesn’t come without sacrifice….We do our best to do this right. Each month we bring home 4-5 horses/ponies. Last month we brought home several mini donkeys mostly due to the fact we had a pony that had not been rehomed yet and a horse we had bought to keep out of the sale that we still had. When we bring these guys home with us, we have a standing appointment with out vet for the Wednesday after the sale. He comes out and evaluates them all and checks to make there there are no major health concerns we need to address right away, and makes note of what we bring home in case anything comes up and we need emergency treatment. A few days later, our wonderful faithful farrier comes out and treats them all too pedicures.
These rescues get treated like family. We keep their hay bags full, give them fresh water and clean stalls, and work with them daily. Training time includes ground work, as well as riding time. We work with them on loading in trailers and desensitizing. With ponies, I jokingly refer to training time during quarantine as “pony boot camp.” Knowing that most ponies are going to homes with children, we do our very best to expose them to as much as we can and get them ready for their kids! Our boys and our oldest daughter Destini do their best to work with the ponies. We have seen some AMAZING ponies come home with us from the kill pen.
We have monthly vet fees, usually running us about $300-400/month. We have the cost of the farrier at $30-40/horse depending on what shape their hooves are in. We have the cost of feeding these guys, and the occasional rounds of antibiotics. We have the cost of emergency vet visits, or a shot for a horse with colic. We have maintenance to keep up our barn, when horses decided to rearrange their stalls and make them their own. It’s not cheap to do this trip every month…but it is worth it.
It’s worth it to me to see my kids learn valuable life lessons. This year, they have grown in compassion, and love horses about like I loved them when I was a kid. We have seen our kids grow immensely. Their screen time has gone down significantly, and they are trying things that they have never done before. Elijah asked me one day, if the horses were really at risk of dying and going to slaughter, why we couldn’t just take TWO trailers and bring home as many as we could. Dreams are being born…
We raise money every month to be able to do this. On our own, we could probably bring home one or two each month. All our donations, usually do not reach the amount of money we spend on the horses and ponies we bring home. But it does help offset the expenses, save some horses’ lives from the slaughter pipeline, and help us be able to keep their adoption fees pretty low. If you haven’t checked out our page on Facebook, please like and follow our page and keep an eye on Aldrich Equine Adventures.