PMU foals could do more harm than good

A Spectrum, by Jean Hale

I would like to respond to the article about the PMU foals. I have been thinking about this subject, as the whole scenario has been bothering me. First, Alaska is a small, closed market for those of us who breed horses. We are isolated by distance from other horse markets, so selling our foals is more difficult as small markets change with the slightest whim of the moment.

Most of us breed for the love of the horses and our chosen equine interests (in my case, distance and sport horses.) Very few of us make money on this endeavor due to the high costs of just having and caring for horses up here. When we advertise a foal for $2,500 we might be breaking even. The $6,500 foal price quoted in the article is a very rare scene up here; most foals sell for less than $3,000, and this would be for well-bred, pedigreed foals with regular breed registries, not some off-shoot registery formatted to give a cross-bred foal essentially worthless papers.

We also screen buyers for our foals to make sure the person is experienced enough to take a baby, know how to feed and care for it, and either train it or pay to have it trained. If it's a new horse owner, we educate them on what effort and cost it takes to have a horse in Alaska.

My favorite saying is -- "The cheapest thing you will do is buy it." I have had a fair share of would-be buyers change their minds when they find out how much hay costs and how much a horse actually eats. A medium-sized adults will go through 12 to 20 pounds of hay, depending on the type and quality, a day, and 15 gallons of water a day, every day. Are you willing to pay more for electricity to heat a water tank? Or haul buckets of warm water three times a day in zero-degree weather?

Right now, hay is spendy since the local crops were sporadic this year. Hay from out of state is running around $360 per ton, last I checked. I have seen it get up to $500 a ton in bad years. Grain for foals runs around $12 for 50 pounds, foot trims about $30 every six weeks, worming every two to three months, and yearly shots, twice a year for the flu.

All these are things that cannot be skimped on. Don't feed them right, end up with poor growth, bone problems and lameness issues, colic (a catch-all term for abdominal problems) -- this includes over-feeding them. In bad cases, it can result in a crippled or dead horse. Don't get their feet done, end up with lameness issues again. Don't know about training and handling horses properly, end up with a spoiled 1,000-pound or bigger animal that has no respect for humans and is dangerous. I've seen far too many of those over the years, and a friend of mine that trains horses gets way too many of those for "fixing."

From what I understand, many of these foals are draft horse crosses -- just what the local packers are looking for come spring. How many are going to be dumped into pack strings when the people who bought these cheap foals decide they can't afford them, can't handle them and are bored with them? How many are going to be broken down early in life from being worked too early in life (this includes saddle training)? Slow growing draft crosses, and other breeds, need at minimum three years of growth before light training under saddle; some need more than that. Do the people who bought these babies know this? Worse yet, how many will end up in the dump or bones in a field somewhere? How much thought was truly put into flooding our small market with these cheap horses?

Jean Hale, of Moosewood Farm in Palmer.