For some horse owners, keeping their animals healthy and happy can mean getting a month behind on rent.
Economic instability, rising costs of grain and an overabundance of horses are leading more owners in North Central Florida to respond to the dilemma by abandoning their animals.
"We definitely have an abandonment problem," said Jillian Lancon, the director of Marion County Animal Services. Ocala, in Marion County, calls itself the horse capital of the world.
Lancon said the office receives two to three calls a week about abandoned horses but cannot take them in.
Instead, it advertises about the abandoned animals, and if the owner doesn't come forward, the horses are auctioned off.
The problem is getting worse because owners can no longer afford to pay for food to feed the animals, she said.
Justin Callaham, a farm manager at the UF Horse Training Unit, said keeping a horse can cost as much as $5,000 a year, not including veterinary bills, which can sometimes be in the thousands.
Some high-end horses can cost as much as $30,000 a year, Callaham said.
"You could buy a car with what it costs to keep a horse for a year," he said.
Lancon said the problem has also grown since a national ban on horse slaughterhouses passed in 2007.
Morgan Silver, the executive director of the Horse Protection Association of Florida, said the ban has affected the horse industry, but not as much as the overbreeding of horses.
"People have produced so many horses that they flooded the market and lowered the value," Silver said.
With so many horses available for sale, little money can come from selling horses anymore unless the horse is trained and purebred, she said.
She said desperate owners have become creative with their attempts to get their horses adopted, with some even putting horses in empty trailers so others will take them home from horse auctions.
Lancon mentioned that some people had observed a herd of 40 to 50 wild, abandoned horses in the Ocala National Forest, though Silver said this is a rumor.
In Alachua County, abandonment has not been as big a problem as neglect, said Art Forgey, a spokesman for the Alachua County Sheriff's Office.
Forgey said the rough economic times have led to the near-starvation of horses throughout the county.
"People will probably quit feeding their animals before they quit feeding themselves," he said.
He said the office is preparing plans for how to deal with horse abandonment if the problem should spread to Alachua County.
Callaham said the best solution to the problem would be to educate breeders and would-be horse owners, but the only short-term solution he could think of was euthanasia.
A skewed view of what life is like with a horse has led to the abandonment problem, he said.
"Everybody wants a baby horse," Callaham said. "When that horse is here, you better have a plan for it."
