I was given a mare that was retiring from the SMU program after many years and a sizebale donation value. The overhead to maintain a retiree is significant, but if the horses give many of their good years to the schools so they can educate their students, they should be doing their best to ensure a soft landing for them.
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I wish USEF could regulate this somehow. Sorry, but if you can afford to rack up a USEF record you can certainly afford to retire a horse. God forbid it cuts into your show funds 
. Using horses up and them dumping them needs to stop. There needs to be some accountability on the people that got miles out of this horse, even if they werenât the last stop before she ended up where she did.
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I think that the USEF should focus on actually preventing abuse and drugging on their own show grounds. This is WAY outside their scope.
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This has two problems (well more than two, but two I am going to mention).
College programs typically can not afford to buy fancy horses. Horses needing to step down and then being donated is what allows the college riding programs to have nice horses.
Taking away the ability to donate a horse will ruin most of those programs.
I see no way that it is logical or fair to punish two owners ago for a horse landing in a bad place.
If I show Dobbin and do well with Dobbin, then sell Dobbin to his next great home, maybe even a step down home, how am responsible for where Dobbin ends up after that?
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I know itâs completely unrealistic but also itâs the way I have owned horses my whole life. I have always kept track of them and consider any horse who gave me useful years of itâs life my responsibility to retire. I had my gelding from 4-9 and took him back at 15 even though he is only pasture sound. He is now 24. Itâs the right thing to do. A flip horse you owned for a year, no. But if you have several years of USEF records racked up with that horse I am sorry you do have responsibility to ensure that horse remains in a safe place for itâs lifetime. Probably an unpopular opinion but sorry, not sorry. Would a young horse I can ride and show cost me the same as my retiree? Yep. Would I prefer that? Probably. But I choose to not be a shifty human and throw my horses away like trash when they no longer serve me.
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I donât think they would do anything directly but I do think the microchip requirement is going to help alot in holding some people accountable, even if only though social media.
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One possibility is the USEF could create a page within the USEF horse registrations where former owners can offer the horse a retirement home whenever it may be needed. Especially with the microchips it isnât nearly as hard tracking down a registered (either USEF or many breeds) horseâs identity and any of them could offer this option, preferably as a free page that would be available to non-members so if anyone finds an identifiable horse they could contact people that have offered a retirement home. I think STBs (I know an uncommon USEF breed, just offering an example) offer this service.
This wouldnât help every horse, but it would possibly prevent this situation.
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Why is it this specific persons responsibility, why not the responsibility of one of the other people who have owned it?
I think it is great that people take back a horse to retire it, I am rebutting your theory that some governing body should make it a requirement of some specific person in the chain of owners of a horse.
Now this I think is an amazing idea!
It would be great if a system like this could be made.
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There are or at least used to be, labels racehorse connections could affix to their papers with contact info, should the horse ever need a home.
A digital version, traveling with breed and discipline / USEF registry is a wonderful idea.
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Judging by that mareâs condition the last owner isnât going to call somebody to come pick a horse up like that. Easier to dump at a sale and walk away.
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Maybe not the person that dumped her at the sale, but maybe an owner before that. Or, once they are found at a sale or in bad circumstances, somebody could be contacted to get them out.
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Not so much that USEF requires a specific person to retire a horse but I would venture to guess some owners/trainers connections end up at end of the line auctions a lot and some never do. A tracking of some sort would definitely help weed out some unethical people (that are probably violating a bunch of other rules too).
Kind of like what the jockey club is doing where you can register on their website for particular horse to offer aftercare for it if it needs it. I think that would be a good idea and it wouldnât cost anything or be horribly difficult to implement.
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For all we know the mare spent 5-6 years in a riding school program after however many years as a show horse. From an ethical perspective, how would that make the latter owner less morally liable for the horseâs retirement than the former owner? Your argument would imply that a show horse has a greater right to a soft landing than a school horse or a back yard trail horse. I canât agree with that logic.
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I think my axe to grind with the USEF record is that it is so freaking EXPENSIVE to rack up a rated record. Donât go on a world tour and then tell me you canât AFFORD to retire a horse. The lesson horses and trail horses deserve soft landings too but the sad fact is in those cases sometimes the money really may not be there.
Obviously peopleâs circumstances change, etc., etc. But I have seen so many people turn a blind eye when a horse no longer suits their whims anymore and it is irritating.
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The problem being that most of these people are using a tax write-off/appraisal to make up for the money that they invested in and didnât recoup. So they âdonateâ it to the school and take the write-off. Some of the schools will turn around and lease or sell the animals if theyâre not a good fit, but Iâm not sure of the ethics of doing that, as I did also know a school that adamantly refused to sell a woman the horse that she leased from them every summer claiming it would be breach of the donation contract. Iâm not sure you can take them back after that without it being considered insurance fraud unless you prove that it wonât ever be used in competition again? Because in that case, why not donate something to get it off your bill while youâre pregnant or going to college, and then just take it back after youâre ready to return to showing?
if itâs donated itâs not insurance fraud to buy it back.
For the woman to buy the horse isnât fraud either. Once something is donated the recipient can do with it as they wish. There may have been a specific contract regarding that horse, but thats not the norm.
My father donated my first horse when I was a teenager, just because he could-to be hateful. She wasnât a good fit for their program (a boys home) so they took her to a livestock auction where she was promptly sold to a kill buyer. I was a couple of weeks too late by the time i found out where she went and what happened.
But if a horse is donated, (or anything else for that matter) for whatever reason, and then placed up for sale for to the public then anyone can buy it. If insurance is involved for loss of use then they usually take the horse so donating wouldnât be an issue.
This entirely depends on the reason for the donation, who donated the horse, and the contracts involved. If the school wants to get rid of the horse they could contact either the person that donated the horse or an earlier owner if they are listed as a contact wherever the horse is registered. If insurance paid out then the horse probably wonât be going back to the earlier level of competition, but that has nothing to do with a school it was donated to. Same with a tax write-off - the horse is probably not worth as much, especially if itâs near retirement age vs. showing at the top levels.
For the first bolded part, the person that donated the horse may have stipulated in the contract that they would get the horse back at retirement or that the school could not sell it.
As for second the bolded part, there are better ways to maintain control, possibly make some money and get a good horse temporarily off the feed bill by leasing it out until you want it back.
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So the issue here used to be that if they donât keep the donated horse for a certain amount of time, it can cause the tax write-off to be revoked and the donor then has to give up the charitable contribution tax benefit (tax laws could have changed since I last looked at it, but that used to be the concern). It is not an insurance issue unless there is some separate set of facts that cause insurance to come into play.
I have heard of situations where horses are on loan or care leased to schools, but those situations donât involve a tax benefit, it just gets the horse off the bill for a while.
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Most ânormalâ people donât ever benefit from the donation anyways. If you use the standard deduction there is no tax benefit so there is no reason to not take the horse back.
If someone makes enough/spends enough to itemize⊠they most certainly have the money to retire the horse themselves.
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