Shona and Joleena Find a Forever Home

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Shona, day 1, two-month-old Ruben at foot

Well, this is big news.

Shona and Joleena are our longest-term residents, having been with us for two years, as our first rescues after the initial dogger yard rescue of four horses that began this charity. We rescued them from a slaughterhouse holding yard, along with their two-month-old colts at their side. They had come from an intensive breeding program and came with evidence of serious and prolonged trauma and an exceptional fear for humans.

Joleena, training with Kerryn Armstrong (pic by Jacinta Armstrong)

While their colts grew up beautifully, and we weaned them, gelded them and found them wonderful homes at six months of age, Shona and Joleena went on to become our most challenging behavioural cases. Physically, they healed well and proved to be robust horses. Emotionally and psychologically, these girls carried some very big scars.

Along the way they spent time with Kerryn Armstrong and Lillan Roquet, qualified Parelli instructors from Intuitive Connection, and while they did progress, their futures seemed to fall into one of two directions: find an exceptional, advanced Parelli home to go to in order to continue their development, or find a permanent retirement home where they could live their days as naturally roaming horses but still with the routine management and care (feet, teeth, worming etc.) that all horses need.

Shona and Joleena, best friends

We’d been offered several homes over their time, where they could run free as wild horses on huge properties, but we wanted more for them than that. At times it was very difficult to turn down these offers, as we tried to balance their needs and preferences (and their preferences were clearly that they’d prefer not to engage with people), with their potential, their lifespan, our ability as a charity to provide what they needed, and what we as humans considered ‘best’ for them.

This week, we received a remarkable offer. Gaye Harvey, from Horse Heaven, has been a supporter of Charlie’s Angels since we began. Her exceptional, professional agistment and training property near Stanthorpe includes a 500 acre retirement paddock. But she also continues to manage the welfare of those retired horses, ensuring their feet are regularly done, their teeth are done and they are wormed and vaccinated. The horses are carefully monitored daily and any injuries or weight loss corrected immediately.

In short, this is exactly what these girls need. It was also of top concern for us that Shona and Joleena were able to go to a forever home together. As they are such good friends and have obviously been through so much, we didn’t want to separate them if it was at all possible.

For these girls to find this forever home, of this quality, is one of those miraculous events that happen for us every now and then that affirm that we’re doing the right thing. Our emphasis is always on quality not quantity. We are not interested in ‘turning over’ horses just to make ourselves look good. We are prepared to hold onto each and every horse that comes our way for their entire life if necessary, rather than risk them going to the wrong home. We are not afraid to turn down an offer of a home if it just doesn’t feel right, and we’re proud to say this has given us a tremendously successful horse-placement record over the past two years.

Joleena

We are so very, very grateful to Gaye and her husband, John, for offering these girls a place to finally call home, knowing they will be safe and cared for for the rest of their days. What amazing Angels you are! We’re so proud to have you in our Angel team.

Oscar Has Been Adopted!

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Oscar, Oct 2011

Rescue pony, Oscar, has been adopted into his forever home!

Oscar came to us in September 2011 as a two-year-old stallion with extreme stallion behaviour. His people couldn’t keep him because they lacked the facilities to keep him safely and happily and couldn’t find him a new home because of his stallion behaviour. Obviously, the first thing we did was geld him.

Oscar, mud monster, pic by Michael Battensby

But because Oscar had been left to develop these behaviours, they didn’t go away immediately. At times our journey with Oscar has been a bit bumpy! He killed one of our chickens, took on full-size Brahmin bulls over the fence, tore down fencing to get to mares, and fought serious battles with the geldings he saw as a threat to his ability to manage the mares on the property.

This pint-sized pony was a power rocket!

In his favour, however, was his great connection and response to people and his exceptional intelligence. This was a pony looking for purpose. The challenge here was to find him that perfect home where he would be mentally engaged and challenged and also in a herd situation where he didn’t feel he needed to defend mares and fight geldings. He was never going to be a ‘paddock pony’. Without something constructive to do, he would only make up his own (inappropriate) games to play. And we didn’t feel he was right for riding by children, which narrowed his adoption options.

At training

We sent him to Australian Natural Horsemanship with Ken Faulkner and Kathy Stewart, as much to give him something to do as anything else. In the Parelli system, we’d call his horseanality an LBE (Left Brained Extrovert) and therefore needing essential mental challenge and a strong human partner.

Fortunes smiled on Oscar when he met Doreen, a student of both Parelli and of Ken Faulkner’s, who was at his training camp for a weekend workshop. She fell in love with him and could instantly recognise him as an LBE and her years of experience meant she knew exactly what he needed. Oscar has been welcomed into a wonderful family of natural horsemanship practitioners, who have only other geldings as paddock mates, and who have a dedicated play arena, with balls, barrels etc. for continued horse development and mental challenge. In a nutshell, exactly what Oscar needs.

We wish to thank Doreen and Dennis for offering our littlest man (with the biggest personality) the perfect forever home. We wish you all a long, happy and fulfilling journey together.

Another Angel takes flight :)

Update on Oscar

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Cute wee Oscar pony has been spending time at Australian Natural Horsemanship in Toogoolawah, working with Kathy Stewart and Ken Faulkner. As you can see, he’s been having a good time!

Horse Worms

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One of the worms that Holly and Fraser have been passing in their manure.

Lovely Holly and Fraser, who came from the Gympie horse sales, have been riddled with worms. They were passing live worms in their manure when they arrived, have since been wormed multiple times, and are still passing out the dead and dying worms.

It’s truly horrifying. This picture is of one of the worms they have been passing. Their foster mum, Jo M, diligently pulled it out and lay it against an ice cream stick to show you how big it is. But it’s not the biggest that’s come out, not by far.

To have worm burdens at this level is a serious threat to a horse’s health. Heavy worm burdens in horses can lead to recurring colic, malnutrition, poor condition, generalised ill-thrift, diarrhoea and scouring, and even death.

Fortunately, we’ve been able to help Holly and Fraser with their condition.

Update on Jimmy

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Beautiful Jimmy is still recovering slowly but steadily after his eye operation and relocation back into our care. He dropped weight at that time, with all the stress, and hasn’t really put it back on as fast as we’d like. Foster mum, Amber, has had a horse nutritionist come and out write up a diet profile for him and hopefully he can start to improve again soon. We will also look at his teeth again to make sure everything is okay in there.

His scarring over his eye is nearly all better and the droopiness (nerve damage) down one side of his face (as a result of the operation) is also slowly improving. In the meantime, he’s being pampered as usual and loving being out in the grassy paddocks.

Update on Grace

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Beautiful Grace is doing much better after a lengthy abscess draining process. She was lame throughout, but not too seriously, and now she’s healing she is up for more activity, enjoying walks out and about with her foster dad, Adam, and some Parelli play. She’s still in really good condition and in really good spirits. So we just need to wait for the damaged hoof to grow down and she’ll be good as new :) We are looking forward to her feeling better so we can ask a little more of her in terms of work. The extended (and unusual) dry spell is certainly helping keep her hooves in safe condition.

Grace is fostering at Palmview on the Sunshine Coast and is still looking to be adopted into a forever home.

Email us at charlies-angels@live.com.au if you are interested in learning more about Grace.

The Stages of Horse Rescue Rehabilitation

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Horse rescue rehabilitation can generally speaking fall into three stages, for good reason. That is, there’s not a lot of point in calling a massage therapist for a horse that needs urgent surgery. And there’s not a lot of point in trying to train a horse that is weak, in pain and sick. There’s a hierarchy of needs in rehabilitation that roughly follows the following pathway.

Stage 1

This stage is about keeping the horse alive and healthy, and is made up of:

  1. Emergency intervention, such as removing a horse from a dangerous situation, critical feeding regimes for severely emaciated horses, or providing urgent veterinary care. For example, when our orphan foal, Bojangles, arrived, he was seriously dehydrated and exhausted and needed tube feeding to get him back up on his feet. When our first rescue, Charlie, came into care, he had a fractured fetlock and needed urgent surgery, without which there was no point moving him onto new levels of rehab. When another of our first rescues, Lincoln, came into care, he had been starved so long he needed specialised feeding to get his digestion working again and put a halt to the downward spiral of ill health.

  2. Max's blind eye needed to be removed as soon as possible.

    Meeting important needs that have likely been neglected. For example, surgeries that are very important, such as removing an eye that is degrading (e.g. Shetland pony, Max, or Tara, who had eye cancer); or gelding a stallion whose behaviour makes him difficult to manage. It also includes dentistry, farrier work, vaccinations, antibiotics for infections and wound management, treatment of Qld itch, and feeding to (likely) put on weight.

Stage 1 also includes a lot of admin work for our team, with paperwork, transport, vet and specialist’s visits, microchipping, photographing, assessments, rearranging paddock routines and so on taking up a lot of time and organisation.

Stage 2

In Stage 2, we’ve past the critical phases and begin consolidating the work begun in Stage 1. This stage is largely about improving what we achieved in Stage 1 (i.e. keeping the horse alive and healthy, and halting downward spirals of ill health) and setting him/her up to bring their best feet forward into the world. A lot of information gathering happens in this stage as we’re still working closely with the horse but the immediate pressure and intense time commitments are relieved.

  • Hoof issues, for example, may take a long time to correct. For example, Tansy

    Tansy's hoof rehabilitation took around 8 months

    arrived with significant seedy toe (white line disease) that required eight months of hoof rehabilitation.

  • Feeding regimes may need to be altered at this stage as the horse has begun to put on weight (or lose it, in the case of an obese horse). We’re also likely to introduce supplements (herbs, minerals and vitamins) as the horse’s individual needs become apparent.
  • In this stage, we’re likely to see behaviour changes as the horse starts to feel better and this is a great time to get a sense of how the horse thinks, reacts and behaves. We might start to ask a bit more of the horse in this time, experiment with different ways of communication with the horse, begin to uncover his/her ‘quirks’ and make some decisions about their future.
  • We also may begin to introduce some therapies that we feel the horse may benefit from (e.g. massage, chiropractic work, natural therapies etc.). [A point on natural therapies: sometimes, a natural therapy such as Rescue Remedy or Reiki can be used right from the start, at the same time as veterinary care, especially if extreme stress is playing a part in the horse's current state of health, or shock is a factor.]
  • Herd dynamics might also be explored in this phase (i.e. how the horse reacts in different herd groupings).
  • Foals may be weaned and gelded.

Stage 3

If a horse is still with us in Stage 3, the immediate pressures of meeting their physical and safety needs have passed and we’re beginning to look to their future. In this stage, we might:

  • Send a horse for rehabilitation training and development.
  • Continue to work on some unresolved issues while still working towards finding them an appropriate forever home with the perfect person who can either continue their progress or manage and accept them just as they are.
  • Start to get enquiries and visits from people interested in adopting them.
  • Have them fully integrated into our own personal horse herds and manage them in accordance with the way we manage our own horses.
  • Continue to love and care for them while we patiently wait for the perfect home to present itself.

How long a horse takes to move through these stage depends on multiple factors, including the specific types of issues they arrived with, their age, their background in terms of handling/training, how severe their issues were, and their own unique requirements.

Update on Bojangles: Luck’s Been on Our Side

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Bojangles, four months

Someone recently left a lovely comment on this photo when it was uploaded to our Facebook site. She was congratulating us on how great he looks and said, “Nice job, you know your stuff!”

Compliments are always nice, but it made me stop and think about that and about just how much we really did ‘know our stuff’.

Bo is our first orphan foal and none of us had ever raised an orphan foal or known anyone who had. To say we were the blind leading the blind was pretty accurate! What we did have on our side was a tremendous amount of luck (beginning that first night of his miraculous rescue), a huge amount of passion, a good deal of intuition, some much-needed financial support to help us meet the demands of his $380 per fortnight formula costs, a willingness to research, learn and question, and an exceptionally hard-working and dedicated foster carer and her understanding family who were able to rearrange their lives to accommodate the needs of this precious, fragile life.

We were lucky he made it through the first night in our care (he needed emergency hydration and tube feeding from the vet). We were lucky when his foster mare, Millie, turned up around eight weeks later and was so willing to foster him. We were lucky when we decided we needed to find Bo another foal to help him continue his socialisation skills.

We’ve had to use a good deal of intuition, particularly in the early days when there was a lot of pressure from differing opinions about how to proceed and several people offered us mares to trial as foster mares but none of them ‘felt right’. (An unsuccessful fostering can be disastrous, with the foal being seriously injured or killed.) We’ve had to think outside the box, and when we changed his formula to a cheaper brand and his behaviour went right off the rails, we had to face some pretty heavy pressure from people who claimed the only way to manage it was to physically hit him, kick him and tell him who’s boss. Instead, we thought backwards and could link much of the behaviour to the change in formula and realised he had a lactose intolerance, switching him back to the more expensive brand that was a low lactose formula.

Bo’s journey hasn’t been perfect or easy. He’s faced some big challenges, something pretty typical of orphan, bottle-raised foals. Not least of which is his limited understanding of horse behaviour, his refusal to eat food (he has only just recently taken his first nibbles of grass), his constant scouring, his unwillingness to connect with other horses, and his difficult behaviour around people. But we keep making strides forward. With each new month of his being in our care, we find a new approach (one that is kind, compassionate and horse-appropriate) to help him develop that little bit more.

And we’re a long way from finished yet. But what an incredible journey it has been so far! We’ve been very lucky to have had the opportunity to save this little man’s life and give him the best start we can possibly achieve.

Did we know our stuff? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe we did but we just didn’t realise it. Maybe luck has carried us over the bumps and filled in the holes. Whatever it’s been, it has been a great lesson in trust, faith and right intention.

Horse Rescue Mission 100 Challenge!

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Orphan foal, Bojangles, now four months old! We've only been able to afford the $380 per week it costs for his formula thanks to our supporters :)

Welcome to week 2 of the Horse Rescue Mission 100 Challenge!

We’re thrilled with the support we’ve had so far in our efforts to reach our goal for 100 people to commit to sharing just $2.50 a week with us ($10 a month) to help us continue and grow our rescue work. Thank you to all who’ve signed up so far. Our total so far is 53. Yay!

We have just one week to reach our dream goal of 100 people.

Can you spare just $2.50 a week? Go to our Donations page to find out how you can set up a regular transfer or debit to help us reach our Christmas wish by Christmas Day.

From all our horses, thank you!!!

Horse Rescue Mission 100, Day 2

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Welcome to Day 2 of Mission 100.

So, here’s the maths. We need 70 people in 10 days to commit to just $2.50 a week ($10 a month) to help save horses. That’s 7 people a day until Christmas so we can reach our goal of 100 people committed to taking the $2.50 pledge. (We started with 30 on board).

Great start on day 1. We reached our goal of 7 people taking the pledge. Can you join us too? Please spread the word… :)

Jimmy

Why do we need your $2.50 per week? Because like all good businesses and charities, what we need is consistent cashflow to help us ride the ups and downs of the unpredictable nature of our work (e.g. emergency horse rescue, enormous and unexpected vet bills, suprise orphan foals that need formula feeding). 100 people donating $10 a month gives us a decent amount of cashflow to help ride these waves, while we continue to pay the ‘normal’ bills too: farrier work, transport, professional training, worming, feeding, minerals, vitamins, dentistry, gelding and so on.

You can organise your $2.50 a week (as $10 a month) by visiting our donations page now to see how you can help. All of your donations are fully tax deductible :)

Can you help us make our goal of another 7 people today?