Rancho Relaxo

08/18/2025

This is such an important read. 💜

Opinion: Why America Must Stop Buying Buckets and Fix the Roof of Horse Rescue

By Allison Bowling, Executive Director of Red Feather Equine Sanctuary

There’s a saying that captures the crisis in horse rescue today: why fix a leaky roof when you can sell buckets?

The leaky roof is the slaughter pipeline. Each year, tens of thousands of American horses are shipped across our borders to be slaughtered. This is not the result of a single failure, but of a system riddled with cracks: overbreeding, the increasing cost of animal feed, hay and veterinary care, limited owner support, and the absence of a national safety net for equines. The most effective way to end this suffering is to repair the roof - to prevent horses from entering the pipeline, strengthen legislation like the federal SAFE Act, and expand sanctuaries and rehoming programs that provide lifelong security.

But fixing the roof is slow, difficult work. It requires coordinated policy, sustained funding, and a willingness to confront root causes rather than symptoms. It doesn’t lend itself to emotional livestreams or viral social media campaigns.

Buckets, by contrast, are easy to sell. In today’s horse rescue economy, buckets take the form of individual “bailout” pleas from kill pens. A horse is paraded before donors with a dramatic deadline: “12 hours before he ships.” For a fee - often arbitrarily set by the very dealers profiting from slaughter - supporters can “buy” that horse’s safety. Each animal becomes a bucket, offered to the public as a way to temporarily stave off the flood.

The problem is that buckets don’t fix leaks. They perpetuate them. Every bailout dollar rewards the kill buyer, ensuring another horse is purchased cheaply at auction to replace the one ransomed. The slaughter pipeline doesn’t shrink; it expands. And yet donors are left believing they have struck a blow against the system, when in reality they have only enriched it.

This “bucket economy” siphons attention and resources away from real solutions. Advocacy organizations working to pass anti-slaughter legislation struggle for funding. Sanctuaries providing lifetime care are overlooked. Programs that help struggling owners keep their horses—preventing them from entering the pipeline in the first place—remain under-resourced. Because roof repair is slow and unglamorous, while buckets offer the instant gratification of a life seemingly saved in real time.

There is no denying the emotional power of a horse’s face pressed against the bars of a kill pen. But donors deserve to know that the choice is not between buying that horse’s freedom or allowing it to die. The real choice is between fueling an exploitative cycle, or investing in strategies that will make bailouts unnecessary altogether.

If Americans truly want to end horse slaughter, we must stop buying buckets and start fixing the roof. That means rejecting ransom schemes, no matter how urgent they appear, and redirecting support toward organizations tackling root causes. It means demanding passage of the SAFE Act to permanently end slaughter exports. It means funding sanctuaries, rehoming programs, and veterinary assistance initiatives that keep horses out of the pipeline entirely.

Buckets may offer momentary relief, but they guarantee the leaks will continue. Fixing the roof is harder, slower, and less dramatic. But it is the only path toward a future where horses are no longer exploited, trafficked, and discarded for profit.

The roof is collapsing. The question is whether we will keep buying buckets—or finally insist on lasting repair.

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Pictured is Red Feather’s Ruthie, a Hurricane Helene survivor whose owner tragically passed during the storm. After being taken into county custody, Ruthie was deemed unsafe for adoption following a serious injury incident. Red Feather was asked to provide her a safe home — without financial support for her intake, and with no sponsors to date. Her story is a reminder of the unseen challenges and costs of responsible sanctuary work.

08/15/2025

What is Rescue? — We all see posts of skinny, beat up horses at a killpen with fundraising pleas to donate, so the horse doesn’t ship to slaughter. Or, we see fundraising pleas to buy the entire truckload of 30 horses that will ship to slaughter unless $50,000 are fundraised. As a result the definition of rescue has become these “life or death” kinds of operations. People give frantically because they don’t want to be the reason these poor horses end up being slaughtered.

But is that “rescue”? Of course these horses are in a desperate situation, they are treated roughly and are beat up. They deserve better. No question. However, the actual slaughter shippers are shipping their contracted quota no matter how many truckloads of horses are fundraised for. If he has a contract calling for 100 horses, he will ship 100 horses. The truckload of horses that were saved are replaced with another truckload of horses. That load of horses the donating public doesn’t see. Even though the total number of horses shipped to slaughter in Mexico or Canada have declined over the past few years, data shows that the specific shippers where most of these horses are bought from, have actually increased their slaughter shipments. One Texas operation doubled its shipping numbers two years ago and are continuing to ship in mass numbers.

So what is Rescue? In the minds of many of the donating public only rescuing from slaughter or buying horses at auctions to prevent them from shipping to slaughter constitutes Rescue. We disagree with that, as do 80-90% of all nonprofit horse rescues.

Last week, we learned of a weanling c**t that a breeder was giving away for free because he wasn’t breeding stallion material. While discussing the situation with a supporter, she stated, “this is not rescue”.

When a breeder who is sick and knows that he will die wants us to take his 15 remaining horses, that were unhandled, but were always fed well and look great, we were told by donors, “this is not rescue, they aren’t skinny”.

Many times, horse owners find themselves in a situation where they lost their job or are going through a divorce or are overhorsed, contact us to take their horses via owner relinquishment. Often we try to provide horse owners with temporary financial support to keep their horses at home, especially in a temporary crisis. “That’s not rescue. Those owners ought to be ashamed of themselves, I would never give my horse away.”

Often we are contacted by law enforcement agencies where they had to seize Arabian horses and we take those horses in. When this happens we are not allowed to post photos of the horse for fundraising purposes or to keep followers in the loop. We have even been told that law enforcement seizures are not rescue because surely we get government funds for this. No, we don’t, there isn’t a magic fund that pays for the feeding and rehabilitation of those horses.

Like us, 80-90% of all nonprofit horse rescues take horses in via owner relinquishment and law enforcement seizures. Because we are a breed specific horse rescue, at times when we see an Arabian horse at a low end auction or a loose horse auction, we try to intercept that horse, but that’s less 10% of our intake. We have even purchased a horse before from a killpen, but we don’t engage in dramatic life or slaughter fundraising tactics. When we have done this, it’s to help a specific horse that we have seen at a prior auction or when we know the history of that horse.

So can we agree on Rescue Definition? 80-90% of all American nonprofit horse rescues agree that rescue entails horse owner support and law enforcement support. This kind of rescue work is worth supporting. It is way less dramatic than the “will ship to slaughter” fundraisers, but this kind of work, especially owner support, prevents horses from ending up at auctions and killpens in the first place.