They Did It: Reduced Length of Stay Through an Efficient Intake Process

There are likely more horses in your community that need help than open stalls in your barn. Fortunately, there are many capacity-building steps you can take to increase your impact that don’t involve building a new barn or acquiring more property.

Key Takeaways

• Prompt and thorough behavior and medical evaluations allow you to make resource-effective decisions to reduce your horses’ lengths of stay and increase your community impact.
• Medical evaluations should be similar to a basic pre-purchase exam and can include bloodwork, lameness evaluations, radiographs and other diagnostics as indicated.
• Behavior evaluations can take place in the first week, once the equine has had a few days to settle into their new home.
• Marketing a horse for adoption shouldn’t happen in a linear fashion. Once you know enough about an equine to make a match and ensure they’ll be safe and comfortable in a new home, the marketing process should begin.

WHO: The ASPCA’s Equine Adoption and Transition Center (ETAC), which offers owners across the state of Oklahoma access to subsidized veterinary care to keep their horse at home or a safe place to relinquish their horse for rehoming. The program often receives horses with minimal training and equines that are older and in need of veterinary care.

DID WHAT: Developed an intake process that accurately and efficiently assesses each horse’s needs so that they have the best outcome. Here’s how:

Intake

Having an efficient intake process helps you plan the pathway to the best outcome for each horse. Although it seems intuitive, it can be hard to put into practice.

ETAC’s first step in assessing horses happens when visiting the horse in the home. For that visit, ETAC pulls a Coggins and conducts an overall health exam, lameness check and blood draw for complete blood count to see if anything is going on medically. If the horse is over 13, they routinely run an ACTH test for Cushings. If euthanasia is the most compassionate option, the goal is to identify that pathway early and perform the euthanasia at-home if possible, to reduce stress for the equine.

Once the horse is on property, a more thorough follow-up exam is conducted. ETAC floats teeth, checks eyes, performs flexion tests and radiographs, and weighs the horse. They document anything that needs to be noted and treat any conditions that need to be addressed from a practical standpoint.

Although it can be tempting to vet a horse reactively, the same tests done proactively can ultimately save money by reducing vet visits and helping your horses feel their best faster.

Training Assessment

Horses spend their first three days at ETAC getting acclimated to a new environment. They are turned out in a quarantine pasture to let their minds absorb their new surroundings.

On the fourth day, basic behavior profile (BBP) assessments are performed with each resident. The BBP gives ETAC a benchmark on what a horse does and does not know, and it gives their training team a good place to start. The BBP sets a roadmap for what needs to be worked on with ETAC residents.

Marketing and Adoption

ETAC does not view pathways as linear; instead, they take a more holistic approach. Rather than wait for horses to be “adoption ready,” ETAC begins marketing each horse as soon as they’re determined to be safe to adopt out. Photos are taken and a profile is developed based on what is known about the horse. Profiles are updated as more is learned, and that information is shared with each person who inquires about a particular horse. Even if the horse has relatively little training or is in the process of a well-understood medical rehab, there are adopters who are willing and capable of taking horses at various levels.

By not waiting for horses to reach a predetermined “adoption ready” state, ETAC has lowered their length of stay from what was roughly 100 days to 44 days in 2023.