The drought of 2011 is waging a war of attrition on Central Texas horses and their owners.

Money is tight, grass is drought-scorched and hay costs have tripled. Owners are trying to sell their horses into a market that doesn’t want them.

Unwanted horses are flooding livestock auctions, where they fetch dismal prices: $350 for a good riding horse, $15 or less for a colt, according to a sale barn in Stephenville.

Horse rescuer Jenn Williams feeds a horse at her ranch near Lorena. Horses are flooding livestock auctions, where they fetch dismal prices.
Duane A. Laverty / Waco-Tribune Herald

Horses are being dumped on county roads in record numbers, McLennan County Sheriff’s Office officials said. And horse rescue groups are overwhelmed with requests to take away animals owners can’t afford to feed.

One statewide rescue operation, Bluebonnet Equine Humane Society, has run out of spaces to place horses, said executive director Jenn Williams, who lives on a small ranch in Lorena.

She said the group still hopes to place its normal 80 to 100 horses and donkeys this year, but it’s getting harder to find volunteers who can afford to foster or adopt equines.

“It’s a perfectly horrible set of circumstances,” she said. “Our abilities are restrained at the time when our services are needed the most.”

Williams, who has been involved in horse rescue since 1998, said she has never seen a year as tough as 2011 for horses and their owners.

“We’ve had so little rain,” she said. “Most people who would let horses eat grass had to feed them hay all summer long. They may have budgeted for half a year of hay, and now they’re having to feed the whole year.”

Williams said the supply of locally grown hay is all but exhausted because of high demand and scant rain so horse owners are buying out of Arkansas.

Williams said the cost of a square bale of hay has risen from about $5 last year up to $11 to $15 this year. A much larger round bale, which lasts a week or two, has risen from about $50 to about $150, she said.

Combined with supplemental grain, the monthly cost of feeding a horse has reached $100 to $150 this summer, with no relief in sight, she said.

In addition, some owners are struggling to keep their horses watered as ponds dry up. Horses can drink up to 30 gallons on a hot day, said Williams, who has a doctorate in animal science from Texas A&M University.

Sheriff’s office

The McLennan County Sheriff’s Office also is flooded with unwanted horses, including many abandoned on country roads, Capt. Kenneth Vanek said. This summer, the sheriff’s office has picked up six to 12 unclaimed horses and donkeys a month — as many as in a normal year.

“We’ve had horses and donkeys turned out who people couldn’t afford to feed,” he said. “We’ve taken them to the sale barn and gotten 25 cents for them.”

The sheriff’s office has taken some to a rescue agency in San Angelo, he said. The county has to hold the stray animals for up to 18 days and advertise them before disposing of them, and a typical animal costs the county $400 to capture and maintain, Vanek said.

Vanek said dumping an equine constitutes cruelty to animals, a state jail felony offense, but ownership is often hard to prove.

He said the sheriff’s department also has checked out many reports of animal neglect this summer, but most cases have not been serious enough to warrant a citation or seizure, he said.

Vanek said trained, high-quality horses are still in demand and can fetch decent prices, but the lower end of the horse market has little demand. There’s no market for donkeys, which makes them difficult to get rid of, Vanek said. The sheriff’s office recently shipped 14 donkeys to the San Angelo rescue and has five on hand now.

A sampling of local Craigslist.org advertisements shows several donkeys for sale for about $50 each, but one ad from Whitney offers a donkey for free along with a free round bale of hay valued at $100.

The Stephenville Cattle Co., one of the few Central Texas auction barns that sells horses, warns sellers not to bring donkeys.

Last month, the barn sold 726 horses on the night designated for equines. Owners Troy and Cheryl Moore said trained riding horses that were bringing $1,500 to $2,500 a couple years ago are now fetching $350 to $750. Colts that were sold for $150 to $250 are now selling for $5 to $15 each.

“There’s no way people can afford to keep feeding a horse unless it’s a performance horse,” Troy Moore said. “Every bite they take costs money.”

The Moores said the drought has caused owners to sell off their horses, but that’s only part of the story. They blame the low prices on state and government decisions that ended the American horse slaughter industry in 2007.

Horse slaughter

Legislation effectively banned the slaughter of horses for human consumption. Two Texas slaughterhouses that had supplied foreign human customers and domestic zoos shut down.

Lorena resident Jenn Williams, executive director of Bluebonnet Equine Humane Society, lets Cypress, a rescued gelding, graze. The drought in Texas has hit horse owners hard and some have dumped horses like this one.
Duane A. Laverty / Waco Tribune-Herald

“That’s what put the floor under the horse market,” Troy Moore said.

Removing the safety valve of horse slaughter created a glut of unwanted horses and depressed the whole industry, he said.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office this June concluded that the horse slaughter ban had “unintended consequences,” shifting the horse slaughter business across the U.S. border. Nearly 138,000 American horses were transported to Canada and Mexico in 2010 for slaughter, nearly as many horses as were slaughtered domestically in 2006.

Williams, the equine rescue official, said those numbers undermine the argument that the end of American horse slaughter caused the depressed horse market. She said Americans simply bred more horses during good economic times than they could care for in hard times.

Williams and her husband keep a stable of horses at their home, at the end of a gravel road in the black prairie east of Lorena. The drought has left deep, 2-inch-wide cracks in their yard and turned fields and trees brown all around them. She said she is pulling money out of savings to pay for hay.

On Wednesday morning, Williams was tending to Cypress, a red dun gelding dumped near Wichita Falls and referred to her rescue group by law enforcement. The horse’s ribs were visible and his coat was faded. He nosed her arm playfully as she held a bucket of feed.

“He’s not sick,” Williams said. “He’s very easy to handle, and he seems to have spent a lot of time with humans. At some point, someone was taking good care of this horse. He’s about 25 years old, and if he hadn’t been taken care of, he wouldn’t have lived to be 25.”

The horse has been slowly nursed back to health during the past two weeks with small, frequent rations of feed to keep him from overeating and bloating.

“You see a skinny horse like this, and you want to open a sack of feed for him,” she said. “That’s the worst thing you could do.”

Williams said the horse would be sent to a foster home in Poteet, where he may prove to be rideable again.

Williams said horses may be unbelievably cheap now, but potential owners should take stock of the true costs of owning a horse.

“Right now, it’s so easy to get one,” he said. “You may get a free horse, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

jbsmith@wacotrib.com

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