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Lucky has a story that befits his name.
At 24, the gentle brown horse has spent his lifetime fulfilling the pleasure-riding needs of his owners’ family.
But last winter, when a member of the family was laid off, cruel realities had to be faced – including the choice between keeping a roof over the family’s head or over the horse’s.
Unable to continue paying for boarding this spring, Lucky’s owners called Michelle Heitz of Fort Wayne.
Recently, Lucky was standing in a stall in a cavernous stable with 31 other horses, which would be homeless or worse had Heitz not started Shadarobah Horse Rescue less than a year ago.
Yes, the recession in Indiana has claimed 401(k) balances, factory workers’ jobs and auto dealers’ showrooms. But there are some little-known victims as well – an untold number of the state’s horses.
“The world is full of unwanted horses right now because of the economy,” says Vuanetta Barnhill, founder of Chocolate Box Horse Rescue outside of Spencerville, which specializes in taking in elderly or medically needy horses.
“People can’t afford to keep them,” Barnhill says, noting that she is at capacity with more than two dozen animals in her care. “This economy has really bit people in the butt.”
Mindi Daughn, director of the Indiana Horse Council, says it’s hard to say whether the number of horses requiring rescue in Indiana is increasing because of the economy, because no one keeps track of them. But she suspects the number rises and falls with economic cycles.
“We’re just looking at another, possibly more intense, cycle,” she says.
One indication of the scope of the problem is data gathered by Indiana Horse Rescue Inc., a non-profit rescue facility in Frankfort. So far this year, courts have turned 42 horses over to the agency from neglect cases – compared with 19 in 2008.
In recent years, the number of rescue facilities in Indiana also has been on the rise. There are now at least 14, with many more individuals doing the work informally, equine experts say.
Heitz says the horse-rescue groups, which usually operate on a shoestring budget by piecing together donations, are part of a usually unseen dark side of the equine world.
The problem of unwanted horses, she says, cuts across many lines. There are Indiana rescue facilities devoted to former racehorses, children’s ponies and specialty breeds. There’s even one that specializes in tending to the abandoned foals of mares whose urine while they are pregnant is used by the pharmaceutical industry to make hormone replacement drugs.
Rescued animals are sometimes in dire shape. Walking through her barn as rain pounds on the roof and turns the paddock outside into a sea of mud, the 43-year-old Heitz points to a young mare and her foal rescued a few weeks ago from Plymouth.
Heitz took in the two from a woman after the mare, already emaciated because her owner couldn’t afford to feed her, was offered to the woman for free as dog food. The woman was told the horse bites and was “mean” and nobody would buy her. She told the owner she wouldn’t leave unless she could buy the mare and the foal, Heitz says.
“I’ve had no trouble with her,” Heitz says of the mare, named Suri. She already has a potential owner lined up. “She’s a sweet horse. One reason horses get mean is they’re hungry.”
Then there’s the 8-month-old Azlan, rescued with two other horses from a farm north of Churubusco. The foal was so malnourished that he could not stand when he came to Shadarobah two months ago.
He also had founder rings on his hooves – signs he had been unable to stand at least twice before, probably from a sporadic lack of food, Heitz says.
After Heitz put him on a careful diet to re-accustom him to eating, the horse is doing much better, she says. But his fur remains matted – horses that don’t have proper nutrition can’t shed properly – and he’s still too fragile for extended grooming, she says.
“We really did not think this horse would make it,” Heitz says, adding it’s “hard to say” how much his growth was stunted and his internal organs damaged because of neglect during his early life.
Jamie Price, a horse-population researcher at Purdue University, says that while prices of hay and grain, medical care and boarding have all posted increases over the past few years, many people believe a 2006 federal law is also influencing the number of today’s horse rescues.
The law banned the slaughter of horses for meat for human consumption in the United States, and while the measure was applauded by horse lovers and pushed by humane societies, it has changed the economics of horse ownership, she says.
Instead of being able to recoup a few hundred dollars at the end of a horse’s life by selling it to the meat market, owners are now faced with the expense of euthanizing their animal and disposing of the remains – usually at a cost of hundreds of dollars.
So, some horses outlive their owners or their owners’ ability to care for them. Older horses, like people, tend to develop medical needs, which increases the expense of keeping them.
Then they wind up, sometimes literally, on Barnhill’s doorstep.
“People don’t realize that horses are fragile, and things go wrong with them,” says the former secretary and social worker, who has two 35-year-old horses, both with medical needs but otherwise in good shape, at her facility.
“I don’t think people realize what’s involved in owning horses.”
Daughn says she’s seen “a trend” of people “not really being responsible for, or even knowing that there’s going to be, an end-of-life issue” with their animals.
She says the council hopes to address that by advocating for more education of owners and an “end-of-life” fund collected when breeds are registered to be used to fund rescues.
In Indiana, Heitz says, some unwanted horses are sold in loose horse auctions to haulers who take them to slaughterhouses in Canada and Mexico.
Some horse lovers believe the practice is cruel, and they buy horses they believe would suffer, not survive or could be adopted, Heitz says.
“I started (Shadarobah) buying backdoor off of a hauler,” she says, adding she is currently not buying at auction because the number of horses being given up by individuals means that her stable on U.S. 33, north of Fort Wayne, is full.
Besides, she says, the auction is “too sad. …You get there and you know every horse there is going to die.”
Still, horse experts say even if the economy turns around, the problem won’t be eliminated until owners stop unwise breeding.
The economy adds to the pressure to breed, Barnhill says; as costs rise, some people will breed a horse in the hope of selling offspring to make ends meet. And because of the expense, others may put off gelding a male until it’s too late.
But as more horses breed, horse prices become depressed because of oversupply, leading to more unwanted animals.
“Don’t breed, don’t breed, don’t breed!” Barnhill says. “If you can’t afford one horse, don’t make more you don’t have homes for.”
But despite it all, some horses just get lucky. Lucky’s family hopes to retrieve him this summer if their economic situation improves, Heitz says. If that doesn’t happen, he has a good chance of being adopted because he’s used to people and being ridden.
“City people don’t know what’s going on in the country, and if you’re not a horse person, you don’t know all this stuff is going on,” Heitz says of her horses’ plight.
“The people in the horse community know, but it’s been going on so long, they, one, don’t think about it, or they know it’s wrong, but there aren’t enough voices (to stop it). Maybe we can start to change things.”
