To me, a “retirement” facility is one where you send in the horse, pay a large fee upfront (several thousands of dollars usually), sign over the horse, and leave for good. They pull the shoes, provide care, and the horse is retired. The situations where the vast majority of posters here are talking about are where they retain custody, and pay a monthly boarding fee for their horses to remain there. To me that is not a retirement facility, it is a boarding facility, regardless of its ammenities, or lack or them.
Many, many elderly or out of work horses live in such facilities, and frankly, I can’t understand why someone who didn’t own a particular horse in such a facility would have a problem with someone who did. Or why they take it upon themselves to think it is their business to care in the first place. Or why they would care, other than to deliberately start a ‘discussion’. If the retirement or boarding facility is a good one, the horse’s needs are truly being met, and the owner feels his or her responsibility is met by keeping up with the board, vet and farrier care and providing everything the horse physically needs, then I say congratulations to that horse for having an owner who is willing to keep footing the bill for its comfort, and has no expectations of deriving any comfort or enjoyment for themselves from said horse in the process. Who in the world would have a problem with that??? :eek: Me thinks this thread is more about baiting than it is about getting answers.
To me, it’s all about the horse first, so if the horse’s needs are better met in a better facility than in the place he or she is now in, then that’s the place the horse belongs in. As for the thought that a large facility couldn’t possible give the horse the care the owner could, well, that depends on the facility. One would hope the owner did his or her homework before sending the horse there to begin with. To assert that the BO of a good, large facility could not possibly care for the horse as well as the owner, or know it over time as well as the owner, and that it could never be cared for as well by anyone else besides the owner reflects an enormous amount of hubris on the owners part, and a real disrespect to BO’s who go out of their way to provide good care for retired horses. The horse knows who feeds it, and that is number one in establishing any person in the horse’s own pecking order, as it is dependant on that person for its survival. The old saying that the guy who feeds the horse owns the horse has more than a kernal of truth in it, even if the owners can’t bring themselves to admit it. There are a lot of happy horses in boarding and retirement situations who happily come to the person who feeds at feeding time, and completely ignore the other humans around, even including the owner who visits once in a while once their daily involvement with the horse has come to an end. And many of these BO’s provide excellent care 24/7 for these horses. So owners really need to understand this, and come to terms with the fact that once they are out of the picture, the guy who cares for the horse comes up in the horse’s pecking order, and often will be favored by the horse who is driven by the need to get food and water from him. Nametags are irrelevant.
I’ve found, over the course of time, that there are two types of owners on each side of the fence here. Those who feel that once somthing is theirs to own it is theirs forever, and those who don’t have a problem letting go of things in their lives. The latter are moer likely to sell a horse that isn’t working out for them, or retire one once it is no longer useful to them withut turning themselves inside out with angst over the whole thing. The former are more likely to claim they don’t understand it, when really they do. They just don’t like it.
