My mother owns a small property, about 3-5 acres. She lives there with her common law husband. On the property, there are:
-15 horses and ponies (with 2 more on the way) -2 dogs (there were 3 but one just died) -a cat
The animals are all fed. They do see the vet if it’s serious. They’re not underweight or anything. But this property is small. And she’s the only one caring for these animals. The husband doesn’t help, barely even leaves his bedroom. She is essentially bound to the property, unable to leave to even go for coffee due to these horses needing around the clock care. A couple years ago she almost missed Christmas over it.
The property is pretty dilapidated looking. There is only a small barn with two stalls in it, one of the two stalls filled with junk. The rest of the horses live in small outdoor paddocks with minimal coverage. Unless the family helps her, she’s alone in mucking all of these horse stalls. Sometimes they get left for days, or over a week, and the feces and urine is so accumulated that it looks unbelievable. She’s tried to hire a farm hand a couple of times, but it never works out for longer than a couple months because the expectation that one person should be able to accomplish cleaning all of these pens in a matter of a couple hours. None of the horses are groomed, ever. They’re always muddy and dirty with dirty jackets and knotted hair. But my mom doesn’t seem to notice.
The horse pens have have big potholes and craters in the ground, filled with big puddles of urine, that a horse or person could easily trip in. The fences are all chewed up by the horses, and the property is overall not really maintained. There is random junk lying around the property like moldy car seats and dead appliances. The house is cluttered and in many ways unkempt.
My mother believes she has this thriving riding school business and that all of these horses are assets of. There are maybe 4 little kids that do riding lessons on a regular basis, and the same couple of horses are always used for this. She used to do summer camps in which more of the horses were used, but summer camps haven’t run in over a year and she doesn’t plan on starting them up again. The vast majority of these horses are never ridden or exercised. They live in their pens day in and day out. If they’re lucky, they get moved to another small round pen for a few hours a week to “exercise”. Sometimes it will be six or more horses in this one small round pen. There are a few horses that she’s had for 15 years and still aren’t trained enough to trust with a child.
She’s also been breeding. The point of breeding would be to sell the foals and make money, but she has produced one foal so far and decided to keep it. The same horse is pregnant again and expecting in a few months. She also has another horse on hold for her for that she’s planning to buy when she comes up with the money. She sees every single one of these horses with a strong sentimental attachment, but the majority of them mostly just sit there eating money and pooping it out, living in their pens every day.
She can’t afford these horses. Several of them were between 20-40k each, and this is money she borrowed from her husbands parents and still hasn’t paid off. The farm isn’t really making any revenue because there’s only a few riding students, and the ones that are paying to ride at the farm the money goes towards paying off the horses she bought, and feeding all of them.
The dogs are also fed and everything, they’re not skinny or sick. But they pee and poop in the house on a regular basis and are never taken for an actual walk; ever. Their nails have never been trimmed. The small dog’s nails were so long they were beginning to grow into the pads, and she’s constantly either matted or shaved bald because they don’t take her to the professional groomer. The other one is a Husky that lives on a chain or in a crate 24/7. The dog has never been taken for a walk, and there’s hiking trails everywhere. I don’t think the dog has ever even been taken off the property more than a small handful of times. She doesn’t even get walked around the property, and is always howling and trying to escape. Multiple times I have seen these dogs escaped and running down the middle of the busy road far away from the property, to no knowledge of my mom or her husband that they were gone. Another little dog was recently put down after much convincing, but that small dog was kept alive in diapers and quadriplegic, with a mouthful of rotten teeth, screaming day and night, because she was struggling to let go of the dog.
She does love these animals and is a truly intelligent and educated person, so I just don’t understand why it is like this. I just would love to see her sell all of those horses and keep maybe four horses that she actually rides. She could use them for riding lessons, and use the money she wastes on all those other horses to make the property, the barn, and the house actually beautiful. That property is probably only big enough to comfortably and ethically house 2-4 horses.... over 2 years ago she said she’s be open to selling “one or 2” of the horses but she never actually looks for a home or put up an ad.
I don’t know what to think or what to do. Is this a problem, or am I exaggerating? Other family members agree with me that it’s a problem, but my mom is defensive about it and sees this farm through a completely different lens
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from Pets https://www.reddit.com/r/Pets/comments/m3z7gu/is_my_mom_an_animal_hoarder/
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