We understand that selling, giving away or even the idea of donating your horse, your child, your loyal friend and companion is one of the hardest decisions that anyone has to make. Its even worse when you are in our situation because we unfortunately get to see all the terrible, horrific things that happen to horses because of bad decisions made by owners.

SWAP does provide services for owners who do not want to donate their horse but want to board and specifically rehabilitate horses and maintain ownership.

We also have brokering, safe selling services for owners who are looking to sell their horse and to sell their horse using our safe selling agreement, that will protect your horse for life, we also offer background checks and screening for both buyers and sellers. Over 3 million visitors come to our web site each month so your horse will be looked at an average of 10,500 times before adoption or a sale.

All fees provided go to taking care of the horse in question and the rest goes to SWAP to help and care for adoption horses. Click here to see a list of Services to horse owners that may need boarding, training or rehabilitation (either for training issues, from overwork, neglect or an injury situation, this is our specialty and many times owners can find out they can keep their horse with rehabilitation). All these services are rarely offered as a convenient package by any facility. Also If you are maintaining ownership but thinking of selling, we will also help you sell your horse while he is with us, for 10% of his sale price, which will go to SWAP to help other horses in their program.

Details: if the donor breaks the contract at anytime, misrepresents the horse or does not pay the board bill that it forfeits all contractual requirements by SWAP regarding the donated horse. It is critical to understand that once the horse is donated he is no longer owned by the donor and they will never be able to get the horse back (unless the horse is available and is adopted by the original owner). Read the donor contract carefully and understand that we have no contractual requirements or reporting requirements to you as the owner and that this form just basically states that you are donating the horse. We do update owners about the horse out of concern for the owners feelings but it is not a contractual requirement.   We are strict about this because our adopters have to have complete assurance that the horse will be available BEFORE they fill out a long application and once the many questions, contracts and fees are done. We would never want to ask anyone to go through our adoption process just to find out the horse they had their heart set on is no longer available.

Why donate to SWAP (The Benefits to donating to SWAP)

We have put together a list of things to beware of when selecting your horses next home. These are tried and true lessons learned from our program over the years and after placing thousands of horses into homes in 45 states and Canada and hearing thousands of stories about sales, leases, give aways, and donations that have gone very wrong.

Things We strongly recommend against when you can't keep your horse, These are major mistakes often made by horse owners:

Mistake # 1. Thinking that anyone can find him a better home than your home. Regardless of what any program tells you, the safest place for your horse is in your barn or pasture. There is never a guarantee even when you keep your horse but keeping it is safer than doing anything else. The person who loves him the most right now is you. This is a tough thing to understand but if you are not willing to keep him through his problems, his health issues, his age, his lameness, your training weaknesses and the cost then do you think that someone else will? The best reason to sell, give away or donate a horse is because it is the best thing for the horse,... but its important to remember that no one will care for him or her like you do.

Mistake # 2. Giving the horse away with only a verbal agreement and not a written contract signed by both parties that covers all the details of care, facilities, sale, etc is a huge mistake. Most horse verbal agreements are broken, horses are sold to abusive/neglectful homes that over use or miss use horses or just inappropriate homes that have no horse knowledge even though they have a big heart. Many are sold to slaughter, even by so called "best friends, rescues or even neighbors". Beware doing any transfers of your horse without a written contract and clear understanding of care, use, facilities, transfer agreements, feeding, shelter, turn out, vet/farrier care, shots and dental work, selling or transferring the animal. etc.  Never allow someone to have, lease or buy your horse without a clear written down and signed understanding of minimum care, exact criteria of use and limits of use, transfer requirements, and facilities required. We always offer our adoption contract to people who are selling or giving away their horse, just change the letter head and change the areas to fit your sale or gift.  This is critical to know... Most states do not have laws governing minimum care, use and over use of large animals so if a person "owns" a horse they can literally do anything to it according to the law, that includes starving it, even shooting or beating the horse if you give them ownership.

Mistake # 3.  Donating your horse to a college or university riding program.  As much as an education advocate as we are we still can't recommend this. Coming from a university program myself I have seen this too much. If the horse can be ridden by 100 different kids, they are worked to death by riders who bounce on their back and pull on their mouth for potentially hours each day or if they can't be ridden by the majority of students they sit in their stall with very little quality time with one person and very little time turned out. When the horse no longer can do the job, it is sold to any person that has the money to buy the horse because that is also how they keep the university program going by selling the donated horses (which can be done legally after 2 years for horses appraised over 5k and immediately if the horse is appraised under $5000.)

Mistake # 4. Donating your horse for a research program or vet study program. Again, education is critical and the need for good vets is huge but its important to remember that these horses are injected with disease, have lameness forced upon them, they are poked, prodded, dissected and studied for the purpose of learning. Yes, learning is critical but why can't it happen on an animal already dead? Most live horses end up dieing in these research programs with their last days being worse than anything that could have ever happened their entire life. To me this is almost worse than slaughter. I promise if you as the horse owner could see what we have seen, you would never sell your horse to anyone with just a bill of sale again because it leaves your horse open to so so many cruel things, that are all legal according to our laws that do nothing to protect your horse. So its on the responsibility of the individual owner to protect their horses, even the ones they are selling or donating.

Mistake # 5. Donating to a program similar to ours that only protects the horse for 2 years and then releases the horse to be sold. These are nothing but glorified horse traders and I am amazed the IRS gives them non profit status as a animal welfare program because after two years they release complete ownership of the horse, putting the horse back into the same cycle of abuse, neglect, sales being done for money's sake only, slaughter and ending up in the endless cycle of going from home to home, many not good homes with no one protecting them. This promotes and invites every evil person that is looking to make a buck to adopt because they know there is a huge profit at the end of the two years, especially when most of these programs are placing horses for $500. or less, the money grubber could make as much as $20,000. or more at the end of the two years. Even though its much more work, the good program bites the bullet and signs up to protect the animal for life and never releases it for sale. If an owner cares about their horse at all they will stay away from programs like this who are just pretending to protect horses but don't want to do the tough work of long term follow up and having horses coming in and out of their program several times to be placed again. Look for programs that will protect your horse for life or at least sign up to not releasing ownership for at least 5 or 10 years and if they do it for less there is a written agreement and strong stipulations about all areas of care, selling, use, mis use and over use, which will keep the horse protected for most of its life.

Mistake # 6: Giving ownership to anyone without examining their financial stability and employment, personal stability and family stability, emotional stability, reference checks from their vet and farrier, criminal record, credit rating, their facilities and their planned use of the horse. No state in the US has minimum care laws for large animals so the law does not even protect your horse. When you give ownership to someone, according to the law, they can do any to it and it won't be against the law. Let us say that again, If you give ownership to the person, they can literally do anything to it or with it and there is no law to protect it. This is a very sad fact but what that means is that you as the owner have to do your homework on where your horse is going. Some people complain that we go overboard in looking at our adopters but people who lie for a living are very good at it, they've practiced it for years. If you are not looking at all these things then there is a good chance your horse will end up abused, neglected, miss-used or over used. Some have said they got their mortgage easier than they got a horse from us but we think these horses are much more important than a mortgage, additionally by the time the bank is about to foreclose on a person that does not pay their mortgage, you're horse could be dead or have suffered years of abuse or neglect.  We check all these things and still run into professional liars, people that have the money but don't want to spend it on a horse, to people who give up too easily, to people who will sign a contract one day and break it the next without thought, to people who are personally very unstable ie. living from one paycheck to paycheck with no cushion, who mismanage their money, who are on the verge of being laid off or divorced, people who will do anything to get a horse just to lie again to sell it to anyone that has the big money they are looking for.  Our application covers a whole lot and will weed out most of the problems just because we do look at things like bankruptcies, criminal records, employment, references, the facilities, the planned use of the horse and even credit at times.  We even put in writing the restrictions about what the horse can do and can not do. Click here and read our adoption contract that every adopter signs and I think you will see that with the exception of putting your horse in your back yard, this is the most protected your horse will ever be.

Mistake # 7. Donating your horse to a program that depends solely on foster homes for the care of their adoption horses. Yes a large farm like ours does have a big overhead and we wish that were different but it costs a lot of money to give quality care to horses and we can guarantee their care while they are with us. We know all the horses are in stalls, have shelter during bad weather, all horses are in 12 x 12 or 12 x 16 stalls, we know they are getting regular turn out, we know someone is around them at least 8 hours a day, we know they have fresh water and we know they are wearing rugs during the winter months. There is strong continuity of care and communications about the horses. Many of the programs that depend on foster homes still request board be paid by the donor and most times it's as much as we ask for here with no guarantee in care or facilities or even education level of foster but we will give donors waivers for our fees, many programs fosters will not take horses unless they are paid.

Mistake # 8. The common myth is that good or great horses never end up in bad situations but that is so far from the truth, we have endless counts of great horses, even famous horses ending up in the worst situations. It only takes one bad owner, one uneducated owner, or one owner who losses their job or their husband walks out to ruin the entire life of the horse. Remember Ferdinand, the Kentucky Derby Winner that died in a Japanese Slaughter....

Mistake # 9. The myth that all adoption and rescue programs are the same. Programs like this are popping up on every corner today and most need rescued themselves because of the lack of financial stability, experience and lack of facilities. Some programs just ask for money and a name and address of their adopter and in reality they are no more than a glorified horse trader.

Mistake # 10. Don't be mistaken about this, good horses do go to slaughter, good horses go to unknowledgeable people making them susceptible to the person thinking the horse is bad. Good horses get old and go lame, they get starved by one person making everyone think the horse is worthless which makes them a target to end up in bad homes and going to slaughter.

Mistake # 11. Divorce and family instability, job instability, loss of the family farm, credit problems, over spending problems, debt problems, criminal and civil charges, arrest, lack of knowledge and even owing back taxes can and will negatively affect your horse and could put them into a slaughter situation or a 'for sale' for money only situation where no consideration is given to the home. How do you check all these things when you sell or give away your horse??? Think about it, if you give your horse to your neighbor and she divorces, her husband could require she sell your horse as an asset, he could even get your horse and may not know anything about a horse. If the person you sell your horse to owes back taxes or ends up in civil court, your horse could be taken as an asset and sold to anyone, regardless if they have the money or knowledge to care for the horse or the facilities to protect the horse. Anytime your horse becomes the property or asset of someone else it can and will be taken as an asset for unpaid bills, debt, civil and criminal charges. My question to horse owners is how do you check these things?? SWAP does, its part of what we do.

Here's the questions you should ask and carefully look at with any program you are considering donating your horse to (we can easy answer all these things for every donor because we do them):

1. How many horses have they put into homes total. How many horses do they put into homes each year, you don't want that number to really be more than about 150 and they should really be doing more than 50 each year if they are doing it full time (which they should be). How many people are on their paid staff? Volunteer staff? A good ratio of people to horses is at least one for every 5 horses at their facility or less. Do they have full time barn help and trainers, exercise people, help to do rehab and general care.  How much land do they own and how many horses do they have on their property and in the program at one time. Ask for their financial statements for the last 5 years, see where they spend their money.

2. Look at the adopters application and contract. Surprisingly, many rescues today do not have either, in essence they are just a horse trader calling themselves a rescue or animal welfare program. Do they make farm visits, do they require photos, do they do background checks, credit checks, employment checks, do they confirm that the adopter owns their farm. Do they get a signed agreement with the boarding facility so that the facility can not take the horse if the adopter does not pay their board bill or any other bill. Have they tracked down horses that are lost, moved, sold and recovered them? Have they been involved in criminal prosecution of adopters of horses that have been starved, have they entered litigation on behalf of their horses when adopters have breached their contract. 

3. Ask where your horse will go while its waiting to go to its new home, exact location and ask to visit, ask for pictures, daily schedules, the experience and training of the foster parent, feed details, turn out, blanketing, farrier and vet details, minimum care and will the horse be in a stall on a daily basis.

4. Does the program have its own farm, if so, go visit on a day when they are not expecting you. Absolutely necessary to have any stability for all their horses. Fosters are sometimes untrained, sometimes unknowledgeable people just looking for a free horse to ride with substandard facilities. Your horse depends on you to be smart and to make sure they are going some place safe.

5. What are the services they promise in writing to give to your horse. Ask such things like will they take adopters into litigation if they break the adoption contract. Do they have a lawyer on the programs staff to do those things.

6. Make sure they protect your horse for life. If they completely release the horse after so many years or sell the horse, stay clear of them.

7. Will you as the donor have all the contact information for the adopter and can you contact them? If the program says no, they could be hiding something. 

8. Do they require automatic formal follow ups from the adopters on a regular basis? Something that shows the horse is up to date on all health care and in good flesh and good health and signed by a vet and farrier.

9. Ask for references from donors who have placed their horse into a home with this program. Talk to those donors and see if they stay in contact with their adopter and have they received pictures from the adopter?

Having all the horses come into one farm does the following for the horse and owner:

-With a central facility or main facility, you can know and see the exact facilities and people that your horse is going to while its being placed into a home. Many programs only say that your horse is going to a foster but do you see the facilities? Are they shown on their web site? Are all the foster homes listed, with facilities and personnel qualifications? Do you know their level of training because programs like this do not have the money to train foster parents? Are they professional horse people with training and the appropriate facilities or are they families with no training that just throw the horse out on pasture? Do you know the level of care they are getting? Most foster homes aren't even professional horse people that do fostering full time, they have families, jobs, husbands, children, etc. so most times your horse ends up rarely seeing people, being turned out and sometimes forgotten until he's placed by someone who hasn't even met him or handled him.  These were tough lessons learned by our program (after having foster horses neglected, never ridden, never exercised, even starved and us not getting regular input, regular pictures or regular information about the horse in order to place him appropriately) and now the only horses that go into fosters with our program are horses that have already been to the Headquarters facility, been evaluated, the people making the decision about the home knows the horse and has handled the horse on a daily basis. Additionally they are only fostered with approved adopters that already have one of our horses and have proven their level of care. This adopter knows we will take all their adoption horses if the foster horse is not cared for.  Currently we are going through a program revision that will probably end up requiring all horses to come to or return to SWAP HQ before being placed because of the downsides of using foster homes. Now this is not to say that Foster homes don't have all the love in the world and all the good intentions but what we finally realized was we were asking people who were not doing this full time to attempt to give as much as the staff at SWAP HQ who were doing this full time. It was just an unfair request and impossible for them to fulfill. 

-With a central facility, a complete initial evaluation can be done on all the horses coming into the program by the same people that selects the home for the horse. We see first hand how the horses are in turn out, in a group, with the farrier, the vet, while being ridden, out on a trail ride, when being taken away from the group, in their stalls, in cross ties and many times while traveling or after traveling and settling in. From our past very hard lessons learned, we realized that the horse had to be in the same hands of the person that is reviewing and approving the adoption applications and the person that is ultimately making the decision about who will adopt the horse. If one person has the horse and another person is approving and selecting the adopter that is a major misconnect and most often than not, it will result in a mismatch, no matter how good the reports are, how good the communication is and how good the horse is evaluated by the foster home. For the most part this is because all horse related communication is "relative" to a persons experience and background. Terms like "green broke, beginners horse, easy keeper, hard keeper, even riding terms such as beginner, intermediate and advanced" mean something different to different people. For example, a hard keeper to one person might mean the horse needs 3 lbs of grain a day to stay fat but to someone in racing a hard keeper is a horse that maybe gets 15 lbs a feeding, 4 times a day. There is a vast difference between those two.  All those things must be defined objectively and we have found that the more people involved in the care and placement of the horse in varies locations all over the country, the more likely for potential confusion. Confusion and differences in training, care and understanding of basic concepts means horses will be ill fitted most of the time. 

-With a central facility, the care of the horse, training and evaluations done at one central location which works better for each horse, provides consistency and insurance of a level of  care. Additionally it gives the adopters one central place to go see all the horses in the program which is economy of time and personnel in matching a horse to the adopter. Let's face it, trying to manage a horse's care and training from 3 states away is like trying to manage your children from that distance. It just doesn't work. You certainly can not decide which home would be best for a horse when you are in West Virginia, the horse is in Florida and the adopter is in Iowa.  Certainly you can check on a horses care but evaluating, training or selecting the best home for a horse is a different story and we feel that requires a hands on approach by the person selecting the adopter.

Certainly donating to SWAP is not the solution for every horse and every owner but if we can't take the horse or if   owners want to look at other avenues, we just ask that each owner be smart about it, for the sake of their horse and its future.  Let's face it. The story is Black Beauty is painfully true, most horses will change homes numerous times through out their life and as of no fault of their own. We've seen absolutely wonderful horses that have been owned by as many as 17 people by age 6. Lifestyles today are unstable, people move more, they change jobs more, divorce happens to 50% of all marriages and all these things will leave horses up for sale or looking for a new home even in our program. The family farm of our parents and grand parents is a thing of the past and because of these lifestyle changes things have become even more unstable for horses. When people selling are driven by money and not the home or they are pressured to sell because of lack of time or money then the horse could end up in any situation. Many could be and will be bad homes that could kill them, make them lame for life, sometimes dieing a slow painful death of being starved, over used or mis-used, abused or neglected by not providing proper vet and farrier care. Some are even shot by unknowledgeable people who think just because they can't handle the horse, no one can, which is so painfully untrue. All we are trying to do at SWAP is make sure that if a horse has to be moved or let go, that they always go into the best homes.  Personally, of my 5 personal horses, its the only option I would ever consider for them. Good Luck!!!