Posts Tagged ‘backyard breeders’
Wonder if they get more for Straight Egyptian in the butcher shops in France?
I got a shocking e-mail today from someone filling me in that the owner of a large Texas Arabian farm had passed away, and that the family, after making a token attempt to sell some horses, had decided they did not want the hassle and sold them all to kill buyer Bill Richardson for $200 each.
I’m going to leave it to you guys to name the farm in the comments. I want to see if the news has spread. I almost have a hard time believing it myself, looking at their (out of date) web site (still up) and seeing the beautiful horses there. Many were Straight Egyptian, many were black (which is often more marketable despite the fact that, like roan in Quarter Horses, it is a color that has been bred for without a thought to the quality of the horse that carries it). I don’t want to think of them on a double-decker to Mexico, even though I believe this person’s email that it did happen. If it did, there is a special place in hell for the family member responsible (but it also appears the deceased gentleman had a gf or wife with him, so WTF was wrong with her? Ladies, learn to take a little responsibility for the animals living on your property and stop wanting everybody else to handle your problems…THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS.)
But again…over 100 horses. Obviously no provision for them in his will or this would not have happened. Though I’m told this person wasn’t exactly Responsible Breeder of the Year, and his pastures were generally dotted with underweight horses with poor hoof care. He just took pictures of the select few that he kept fattened up and cared for.
First of all, I’m curious if you guys know what farm I’ve talking about and have details to add. EDITED: OK, the word is out. It was Ramses Arabians in Texas and the horses CAN still be saved. Here is the info: “Darlene Cruite is corresponding with Bill Richardson. She is trying to compile a list of available horses. Bill bought 150 for $20,000 ( about $150 each)He has to keep them 2 to 4 weeks to have their paper work ready for them to cross the border. We only have that much time to find homes and get them moved. Darlene’s contact info is: home; 903-893-8690, cell; 940-368-3329, e mail ; 4kuhaylan@prodigy.net. Bill is not returning Lett’s calls. His contact info is; Penncross Ranch 121 85 FM Rd., Kilgore, Texas 75662 . Phone; 903-984-3819, 903-649-1658, e mail; penncross@tyler.net The clock is ticking, get this info on all the egyptian forums ASAP”
I’M SERIOUS PEOPLE…don’t call unless you can save a horse. I don’t want to hear that someone started shit and acted like an idiot. If I find out you did, you will be featured here…prominently. P.S. The kill buyer no more cares that you think he’s a fuckhead than Charles Manson cares that you think that. Don’t talk to him unless you can be NICE. It accomplishes nothing except endangering horses to do otherwise.
Secondly, and this goes for ALL breeds, what do you think is the best solution to these 100, 200, 700 horse clusterfucks we seem to be seeing? Do you think there should be restrictions on how many animals you can own without showing proof of financial stability and ability to care for them? If you are the owner of a very large farm like one of these, I’m especially interested to hear from you what restrictions you think are fair and would not punish the good people.
I have been saying for years that there needs to be a $50 or $100 per foal municipal tax. The local municipalities would LOVE to enforce it as a source of income. It would not harshly affect the breeders of quality foals that are going to sell for good money. What it would discourage is the breeding of a large quantity of foals, or the breeding of foals likely to sell for $500 or less.
I know this is America, and we’re the land of the free, but we genuinely can’t afford to keep cleaning up someone’s 100 or 200 or 300 horse mistakes, and I think it’s atrocious that many were deliberately created just to wind up going to slaughter. Again, if horses were more rare, your prices WOULD be back up. It has nothing to do with slaughter, it has to do with the fact that we’re still breeding more horses than the market will bear, and plenty of them aren’t getting any training. How in the world do we make breeders scale back/take a break? I know many of you are already doing that, but I don’t mean you — I mean the arrogant idiots who think their horses are more valuable than gold even though their inability to sell any contradicts that. Is there ANYTHING that you’ve seen work on these people? What do you think might?
I know you are all very concerned about EHV-1. The latest info, state by state, is at The Horse, so check it out there for sure. The only travel restriction right now is for horses coming into Wyoming, so if you need to get in there, you MUST read the article and make sure you have a health certificate within 72 hours with VERY specific language and a temperature reading or you aren’t getting in! I’ll continue to post the news if other travel restrictions go into effect.
For those of you in the PNW with a soft spot for old broodmares, here is some recent video of Exclusive Report. She is still at Second Chance Ranch looking for a home. She had several months of professional training last year and was riding nicely at a walk, trot and canter at that point but she has been vegging out for a while now. This is a lovely mare who is sound and loves people. Watch her video here.
America’s Largest Breeder of Neglected Polish Arabian Horses!
I’m a little late to the punch on this (sorry, busy weekend!) but a few days ago, about 130 Arabians were seized from Canterbury Farms in Maryland. Here’s some video, thanks to the Washington Post:
Days End Farm Caring for 150 Neglected Horses
And just to make things more entertaining, the breeder gave a dozen horses to Last Chance Corral in February and then tried to act like she was doing THEM a favor! Here is her own post from ABN: “The post by Last Chance Corral is for some lovely horses that I have donated to them, if and when they can sell them. This is to help this respected rescue center raise money to pay for the rehabilitation of neglected and abused horses. To make this PERFECTLY CLEAR to all…. that these horses are still at my farm, healthy and certainly not neglected at all. By donating them, this is my way of helping out the horses that are very much in need. LCCorral does not have them at their place. My only stipulations to LCCorral was that they were to be sold to good homes and must be gelded prior to providing AHA documents to the new buyer for registration. This way it isn’t adding to the stallions galore which contributes to overbreeding and yet the horses retain their heritage. They are show quality youngsters with spectacular pedigrees for halter, performance, endurance, racing, trail, and best friends.Since things like this are often taken out of context and to the hysteria level, I am posting this clarification so those inclined to be sanctimoniuos or misinterpreting the DONATION as a rescue, that this IS a DONATION to help THE rescue group, not that the rescue group has taken the horses. I trust that this is clear. The horses may be viewed at my farm (fat, happy and healthy) and you can purchase them from LCCorral. The prices asked by LCCorral are extremely reasonable for the quality of these animals and their breeding. It is certainly an opportunity for someone to get a spectacular horse and help a good group.
Thank heavens for rescue groups that are GOOD!”I’m doing them a favor! It’s a fundraiser for the rescue to have these amazing horses from me! Boy, broken record, how many times have we heard that sort of silly shit before? No rescue takes in horses to resell for money. If a rescue tells you that, they are desperately trying to get the horses away from you so that they can be cared for properly.
The Arabian horse world is freaking, and I don’t blame them. In this case, I will agree with many of the breeders freaking — I think it is ridiculous that just because the horses are in the rescue pipeline, now it’s OMG WE GOTTA GELD EVERYTHING. Um, no. Not a single one of the stallions on this page NEEDS to get gelded — they need to live at a responsible breeding farm with a reasonable number of horses and, you know, the ability to balance the fucking checkbook. None of the mares on this page is effing up the quality of Arabians by reproducing or needs to be stopped from ever doing so again. This woman, Marsha Parkinson, wasn’t breeding crap. What she was doing, sorry to her defenders who are like “but they’re not that bad!” (No, most are not Grace, but they are not good – those yearlings scream MASSIVE PARASITE INFESTATION and if you watch the videos, some do truly look awful) is the usual over-the-top egotistical asshat breeder trifecta:
1) Not worming/doing feet
2) Not HANDLING…stuff isn’t trained appropriate to age, not even fricken halter broke. Why are we having to load purebred Polish Arabians with panels like mustangs?
3) Again, JUST TOO DAMN MANY! Stupid bitch had Thirty Eight Foals Last Year! You do not need 38 foals. If you’d had FIVE foals, maybe you wouldn’t be flat ass broke and unable to care for them. Maybe they’d have sold and you could have bought some damn wormer for the rest. I mean, even with 150 head, for $450, you could worm them all with the generic stuff from Country Supply. If you had sold one foal for, say, $2500, you could have fed a couple of your old mares hay pellet mush all year and they wouldn’t be in actionable condition now. Why is it no one can do simple math?
I mean, this is one of the mares. DEFHR has her labeled as Helania but I am wondering if she is *Candela, because the Marsha Defenders keep saying that they’re showing a 33 year old and it’s not faaaaaaair. I do not care if she is 33. She does NOT need to look like this. This is BULLSHIT. If she wasn’t 3,000 miles away, I’d love to take her and show the world just how fast she could fatten back up. I know lots of people who could do it.
I have so many questions here. One is, if she’s so famous, didn’t anybody ever visit her farm? She was extending an open invitation so clearly she was delusional about how bad some of the horses looked. I mean, someone turned her in, so kudos to them. But why is this such a surprise to the Arabian community? I’m guessing plenty of people saw her skinny, wormy stuff and thought, oh well, poor Marsha, she’s 66, and (my favorite line!) “she’s doing the best that she can.” I see her defenders running around the Internet now screaming that the skinniest horse pictured is 33. Again, so what? I have had a dozen threads showing you guys fat 30+ horses. It’s called proper care. Grace, by the way, has been verified to be age 28. Didn’t stop Darla from returning her to hog fat condition in three months.
Here’s another question: Is the young stock registered? Bet you they’re not. Another typical fail when farms get this big and the money isn’t there.
Here’s another question: Has any of this stuff been shown? Does she have horses in training, or does she simply think bloodlines are valuable enough to sell them? Sorry, but that just isn’t how it works anymore. The vast majority of horses in the world have little to no value until you put training on them. The value increases exponentially as they become (a) safe for most riders and (b) acquire a show or other performance record.
Another question: Marsha was merrily posting to the ABN board as late as April 4th. Uh, I think you had plenty of opportunities there to say, I’m overwhelmed, can anyone take some horses? People would have snapped them up. But mark my words, Marsha’s gonna come out sounding like James Leachman, soprano edition. She will say BUT THEY’RE SO VALUABLE! I wasn’t just going to GIVE them away. Well, maybe you should have before you became famous as the lady who was neglecting the largest herd of Polish Arabian horses in the U.S.
And my usual questions: Why did/does anybody need that many horses? You are not going to ride that many. You do not need one-tenth that many to have a successful, super high quality breeding program. Financial misfortune can happen to any of us, as can a health problem, and planning for any eventuality means keeping your horses in excellent condition, training up to date, etc. If you can’t keep everybody up to date on all the basic care (feed, deworming, feet trimming, dental), all the time, you have too many. It’s just not that confusing a concept.
It will be interesting to see this one play out, but I am definitely siding with the Arabian community on this point: It is ridiculous to remove these horses from the gene pool just because they had the misfortune to be owned by the wrong person. To me, it’s like Prohibition. What, now no one can have a beer because SOME people weren’t responsible with their drinking? Stupid. The breeding quality animals should stay in the gene pool and the culls should be gelded/go out on no-breedin contracts. I wish I could just send the whole herd to someone like Sheila Varian to evaluate and make that call. Now THAT would be a sensible solution! What do you think?
P.S. As to any rescue wars here: Pipe up! If you have horses from this seizure, feel free to post who you have with your information and link to donate. We’ll settle who is doing the work here pretty easily, won’t we?
Congratulations! You’re EVERYTHING that’s wrong with BYB’s!
Original blog here about James Leachman, in case you missed it.
Leachman turned out to have EIGHT HUNDRED AND TWENTY NINE HORSES
Those of you familiar with my blog know that I don’t use the term BYB in any way that has a particular relationship to backyards or lack of facilities. You are a BYB in my book if you do ANY of the following:
- breed stuff you can’t afford to feed, vet and trim regularly
- breed stuff you don’t handle and train appropriately to its age
- breed registerable foals but then fail to register them
- breed without researching to ensure that there is a strong market for the resulting foals (and I don’t mean the kill pen)
- Keep crippled mares endlessly pregnant as baby machines. I don’t mean mares that are a little off at the trot. I mean mares with huge knees that can hardly walk to the water trough.
- breed with no attention paid to avoiding genetic diseases
- keep horses in an inappropriate facility, including ANY barbed wire, extra credit for foals out on barbed wire
- breed anything, even nice horses, in such an excess number that you drive down the entire market for them.
Leachman fails on every single count here. Eight hundred and twenty nine! And of course, wild as hell since they’re either unhandled or haven’t been handled in years. Even nice broodmares, running with a herd, quickly become convinced they are wild mustangs from the prairie. Anyone who has ever worked on a breeding farm and had to go get ONE MARE out of the herd to see the vet knows this. 
Never a good time. But at least on a proper farm, mares are pulled away periodically, for vet care, for hoof trims, for deworming. These mares probably have not been touched in years, so that even if they had some training on them at one time, it is going to be a challenge to get them back to usefulness.
Then you have to look at the hoof neglect. You know, hooves are not hedges. You can’t just let them overgrow for years and years and then take a clippers to them and all is well. Neglect leads to problems that aren’t always fixable. A lot of these mares are coming out crippled, and it didn’t help that Leachman left leg bands on them that cut into the skin, as described in the article.
And, really, I don’t know why I’m discussing this at all since the vast majority of them are going to be on a dinner table within weeks. They’re all going up for sale. Who do YOU think is buying?
Leachman horse sale expected to start Saturday
Let’s remember from the original story that the reason Leachman didn’t sell them off earlier was that he didn’t feel they would go for enough money and, you know, these are his Rare Speshul Unregistered Quarter Horses we’re talking about here. Well, dickhead, now they’re mostly going to be Rare Speshul Unregistered Quarter Horse Steak. Hope you’re proud of yourself, you piece of lazy, selfish, irresponsible shit. One man’s ego is now going to lead to the slaughter of the majority of 800 plus horses that did not even need to exist in the first place if no one was going to do anything with them. Not to mention that it has cost the poor people of Billings six figures and counting to deal with cleaning up this moron’s mess. I’m surprised he doesn’t get tomatoes thrown at him in Wal-Mart.
Again (and I know I’m preaching to the choir), it’s not like growing carrots! You can’t just MAKE them, you have to TRAIN them and put WORK into them to make them worth anything! And especially so when they are nothing special to begin with. Argue with me all you want about which AQHA lines are the better ones, these AREN’T the hot bloodlines that sell for good money. These are long-backed, common headed foundation breds. Do some people like them? Sure. But they don’t have the same value to the average buyer, standing there in a field, as they would if they had pedigrees full of close-up ties to top cutting horses, reining horses, or western pleasure horses.
Those of you who think they’re awesome horses, hey, get on out there and bid – I’d love to hear that some of them did not go straight to kill, but I am not holding my breath. Leachman should be drawn and quartered for this spectacle of senseless suffering. A lightning bolt should just come down and hit him. What a pig.
Today’s adoptable horse from Shiloh Horse Rescue is Intrepid, JC name Aeronautics. This poor guy was dumped at the feedlot straight from the track fully bodyclipped in November 2009 so he was shaking like a leaf when Jill got him. He had a suspensory injury and an old fracture, so he has had time off to heal and now is slowly being re-started under saddle and all looks good. He’s only six so he has a lot of great years ahead of him in an easier profession than racing!
Bitching on the Internet = NOT pointless!
We’re back…and the only thing we did lose was the previous comments to this post, for which I apologize. Totally my fault, as I backed up before I posted it. Thanks for your patience! Hopefully we’ll be faster now…let me know.
One of the criticisms frequently leveled at this blog (and others like it) is that we’re just bitching on the Internet and what are we really doing to help horses? While most of us actually ARE doing other stuff to help horses in our real lives (and yes, we do have them), I want to point out that bitching on the Internet, in of itself, creates change. Remember this blog entry? Even Pigs Can’t Live Like That Well, not only did the horses get saved but now the owners got charged.
Copperopolis horse owners plead not guilty to animal abuse
From the article: “After photos showing the living conditions of 10 horses in Copperopolis, including this one, began circulating on the Internet, the Calaveras County Sheriff’s Office and Animal Services removed the animals from the property.” So every time someone asks what you’re doing to help horses…you’re having enough guts to stand up and bitch until someone helps them! And that DOES WORK!
It’s not like I didn’t warn you…
As none of us are surprised to hear, Seize the Day turned into Seize the Horses. The Sheriff has finally gotten off his posterior and taken that psycho Byrde Lynn Hill’s horses away. Well, the ones that are still alive, anyway. And they can’t physically take them away, because now they are having a blizzard down there. Hey, Sheriff? I told the world about this on December 7th…start paying attention to my blog and you won’t have to haul hay in a blizzard two-and-a-half months later. And you might have actually saved some of those lives.
Original Blog about Carpe Diem Farms
As I noted before, one of the most shocking elements here is that the woman who created this trainwreck has her doctorate. She’s not dumb. She might be nuts. But I’m guessing she’s not even clinically insane. She’s just another asshat who created a mess and walked away from it. Out of sight, out of mind. Can’t see those dying horses from your home in Seattle, can you Byrde? Don’t have to watch them and have your little emotions hurt by seeing their suffering (or more likely, by having to think about the loss of “your dream,” because we all know this is ALL about you and ZERO about the horses, don’t we?). Can just pretend everything is fine down there at the farm, right?
I’d love to interview her. I am sure she has, as my mom used to say, more excuses than Hector’s got pups for this situation. Might make for a good Youtube video, anyway! I certainly hope Wallowa County gets angry enough about the cost and the work this dumb bitch has created to prosecute the hell out of her. I know better than to hope they will get angry enough about the unnecessarily dead, beautiful Lusitanos.
When I hear something about the case, or when horses will be available to adopt, I’ll let you know. I can see some really nice rescue success stories coming out of this disaster, and if you ever wanted a $25,000 Lusitano, I’m guessing you’ll be able to get your hands on one for $500 sooner than later. And given how upset IALHA was with her anyway, I’m guessing you’ll get your papers. At least that’s going to be a win for the good homes wanting one of these horses!
