Another year has flown by and there are a lot of things to reflect on for me, personally. What a year it has been! Unless you’re new to GERL, you already know that the last year has been all about the three stallions that I fostered. Black Jack was castrated in August and the other two were done in November. They taught me a lot of good lessons on safety and cemented the old adage that a good stallion will make a great gelding. By Christmas, each had gone to their forever home, and I am receiving reports and videos that prove that they have all transitioned nicely into the world where they get to graze in a large pasture with other horses; they get to hang out as long as they want with their new best friend, they get to experience just being a horse, and as their foster mom, I could not have wished for more.
Speaking of castrations, GERL just wrapped up our Stallion to Gelding Castration program at the end of November and there are now 61 new geldings as a result. This is one of the most important programs that GERL sponsors and we’ve been offering this low-cost castration through participating veterinarians since 2010. And let me say this, about that…GERL gets nothing back by offering this program to Georgia stallion owners. We rarely, if ever, have received a thank you, nor have we ever acquired a new member as a result. We’ve had several individuals get as many as a dozen of their stallions gelded through this program at one time and never hear from them. It is ok. We are not offering it because we expect anything in return. We offer it because it is the obvious fix to a serious problem. In one incident, we helped keep a dozen stallions from reproducing and that is the carrot in this program.
Think about this…how many horses on average do you think are rescued by one local rescue organization each year? More importantly, what is the average length of stay? I decided to do some research on this topic and stumbled across a link to an organization called Equine Welfare Data Collective (EWDC) that collects data about rescue horses. I included something very key from their article that people need to know.
“Capacity to help horses in need is the top number everyone wants to know, says Stearns. Length of stay is also identified in the EWDC Fourth Report as a critical data point to understanding the current annual national capacity for assisting at-risk equines and those in transition in the custody of equine welfare organizations. A preliminary number estimates around 200 to 300 days as the average length of stay for horses at a rescue or adoption facility.
“What we were able to come up with was a daily capacity: how many stalls exist, on a given day, for horses in rescue,” says Stearns. “And that number hovers around 47,000. People get worried that capacity is limited, but what we can do with this knowledge now is direct programming in ways to increase capacity through decreasing length of stay.”
Using the number 25 as a conservative guess, it will take a large number of rescue organizations in each state to be able to handle their unwanted horse problems if the horses do not find adoptive homes within a few months. Now, if all those same rescue organizations also offered a low-cost castration program in addition to rescue, they could see more bang for their buck, so to speak. You see where I’m going with this?
Thanks for your support in 2023!
Happy New Year!