I answered a note on a friends wall post and thought I would post it here as I believe it is probably a question that is asked often - why are adoption fees what they are for horses? The person asking was why some rescues "wanted and arm and a leg" for a horse and the rescues "wanted as much as 2000 (sic) for them"...sigh...this is a really disheartening question for folks like me that work daily to dispell the "Rescue Horse Myth" - which basically is - if he or she is a rescue, must be something wrong - SO SO SO not the case in many, many, many instances.
Be sure to read this blog post about what it REALLY costs to rescue a horse, properly, from auction or kill pen. Below is my reply to her question/post:
Our fees run anywhere from $1200 to $3500 depending on the horse and our fees associated with the horse. These fees are for horses that, if we were private sellers and offering NONE of the guarantees our rescue offers each of our adopters, would be 3x higher.
Our horses are up to date, shots, feet, teeth, coggins, deworming, etc all are professionally schooled and are usually started over fences and/or doing dressage, eventing, field hunting etc. Minimum 90 days training after qt and ground work.
We put A LOT of time, money, effort and energy into our horses and our program and the fees from the adoption of a $3500 horse will allow us to go pull several more from the kill pen and start their entry into the Angel Acres program.
We also guarantee all of our horses to be exactly as described, you won't get a sick or unridable (unless we are adopting out a companion only horse or something) horse from us. We also have the $1 program for repeat adopters.
MANY good rescues have higher adoption fees, we must, in order to administer our programs. We are NOT federally funded and we (horse rescues in general) are usually the least funded of the companion animal groups.
Check out grants for horses and then check dog grants, there are, on average 25 dog grants available for each single horse grant available! YET, our fees are 10x per animal what it takes to care for a dog. And people do not just donate to us...funds are tight everywhere...sadly...
We also don't work with brokers and just give the horse to anyone who opens their pocket books and makes a donation. I speak to each prospective adopter, I screen all applicants thoroughly and I do the absolute very best to make sure the match between horse and adopter are fantastic!
When rescues are pulling horses from lots and seeing them for 10 mins before giving them to someone because they wrote a check, well there cannot be whole lot evaluation of the horse or the adopter going on.
So, please give rescues who charge larger fees a chance...you will be glad you did! Check out fuglyblog.com to see a list of great rescues with horses available for adoption!
Jo Deibel
Angel Acres Horse Haven Rescue
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