Adoption Fees Cover Costs

Each horse we rescue costs up to $1,500 to buy from the kill lot, transport to safety, evaluate, rehabilitate, retrain and prepare for adoption. Your donations of time, goods and money help to defray the cost of loving horses from slaughter to sanctuary, and enable us to save even more equine lives.

There Are No Free Horses

By the time our horses  are ready for adoption, they’ve spent a minimum of 45 days with us.  Most are with us several months before we list them for adoption. That means they’re like family, so we make sure they’re adopted to adopters who will love them like we do. We’ve learned that people are more likely to take care of something they’ve earned. We’ve also learned that even the best sob stories end the same as the worst sob stories: Things just didn’t work out with the horse. Most of the time, the horse gets the blame.

Here are all the factors that go in to our adoption fees:

1. People value what they invest in – either with time, money or heart. They’re more likely to try to make things work with a horse they spent $1,200 on than one they spent $200 on.
2. It’s easy to make money at auction on a horse you get for free. A horse purchased for a few hundred bucks will sell at a profit to a kill buyer at auction. We never price a horse under its meat value.
3. Horses we adopt out cost us a minimum of $1,500 to rescue and get ready for adoption. 
4. Horse ownership is expensive. If our adoption fees make you squeamish, think about whether you can afford the first vet bill for an accident or illness…because they happen. Plan to spend between $2,400 and $3,876 per horse, per year.  And that’s for a healthy horse!  You’re looking at $200 to $325 per month, per horse. While Swingin’ D has covered much of that cost for the first year, you need to think about every year after.
5. Our adoption fees are more than fair for the horse. If you were to purchase the same horse on the open market, you’d easily pay twice what we ask. Just because a horse was unlucky enough to have an owner that discarded it as trash, doesn’t make it trash.

Swingin’ D Horses are Good to Go

When you adopt a horse from Swingin’ D, your horse is vetted, vaccinated, trimmed, evaluated and good to go. Most have a clean Coggins or health certificate. The horse’s teeth will either be floated, or we’ll tell you when the vet recommends its next floating. We give you whatever records we have, along with the name and number of the vet that treated it. You’re free to call the vet to verify what we tell you. We use reputable, licensed veterinarians that have no ties to our organization, so you’re also free to Google them to check their references.