The Shortest Day of the Year…………

The winter solstice…..The shortest day of the year…or the longest night, however you prefer to look at it.
I started out to write this as commentary to the Ranch Manager’s piece on Karen Sussman and it kind of evolved into an opinion. I have never been short on opinions. The comments of earlier discussions involving rescues, thin horses, education, and other management issues made me wonder exactly what constitutes cruelty and abuse.
I don’t agree with Cheyenne Canyon Quarter Horses and Paints/Black Hills Sanctuary’s breeding of mustangs until 2009 when the BLM has been struggling to place horses removed from the public range, but Mr. Hyde is/was a rancher. He is familiar with range and livestock management. He has maintained his facilities and land well. His horses winter out in the Cheyenne River breaks and canyons. 11,000 acres or more with around 600 horses and good winter feeding practices the property and horses can operated in the same manner as any other ranch. I will disagree with his philosophies. I will not take away from his management. This is a paragraph taken from The Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribal News article about horses surviving the winter. “At the sanctuary near Hot Springs, the horses eat grain daily in winter, and workers make open water available. Charlie Summers, who photographed the sanctuary horses and his wife Rita, saw other dangers, besides lack of food, water and shelter. On the sanctuary, the winter perils are slipping on ice of the Cheyenne River and causing serious injury. There are mountain lions in the Cheyenne River Canyon and we do see some skeleton remains of horses from unknown causes, says Summers.”
These sanctuary horses have it much the same and somewhat better than their free roaming relatives. Things are different for the smaller rescues and less managed sanctuaries. I wonder how many of the well meaning contributors to these establishments have any idea how quickly the living conditions for the stock can deteriorate in an over-crowded poorly managed facility, not only rescues and sanctuaries but private horse owners. The rescue situation brought to our attention by Ranch Hand 2 is another good example.


When I wrote the market opinion blog several months ago I made a statement about placing a wanted to buy ad and waiting to see what turned up. I used this picture as an example of the situations so common.

The horses are thin. They have no papers, no conformation, no training, and no value. The excuse for this now is “rescue”. “I got them out of a bad situation”, “and near as I can tell you haven’t offered them any improvements”. Winter is coming. Winter with the management and nutritional challenges those of us who have wintered many animals for many years cope with, plan for, and deal with quietly. Winter will look a lot different for horses like Dayton Hyde’s or mine than it does for Karen’s, Epona’s, or even the ones above. On the ones above or one like him, no one will even pick them up to get them out of the bad situation that “saved” them from the last bad situation. The problem now……as long as they are not slaughtered…..no one cares.
The phenomenon I can’t grasp?……. horses who are hide stretched over the bone, standing in ankle deep mud, s***, and walking over the dead bodies of the ones who weren’t so hardy at a rescue or a private owner constitutes a situation needing education, help, and more money from someone not at all involved, not an immediate call to law enforcement. If they are dropped off at an auction…..the auction owner is responsible and becomes blog fodder for 50 animal angel/sharkonline/anti-slaughter see how horrible this is, finger pointers. If they are in the holding pens of a trader who may or may not buy butcher horses, they are in a “feedlot” and the same course of action is required. Three Strikes was not “outed” by the any anti-slaughter, animal rights, rescue, or any sort of horse saving community internet police corps…….Nope….the neighbors……farmers and ranchers who had to drive by the stupidity every day, reported it. Are Epona and Karen Sussman next on the list???

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Their concept of cruelty has to be in the end destination not the horse keeping practices. Here is a picture of one of those horrible Canadian feedlots. Those are round bales stacked up as a windbreak. There is feed over-flowing the bunk. The pens are scraped and clean. The horses look comfortable and fed. They don’t have a bright future but neither do the mustangs at Karen’s sanctuary, the horses belonging to the owner above, or rescues we have talked about earlier on.

By RH1