Show us your love for horses!!

Big Heart Day is next Sunday, 1st August! 

Come and join us in Teralba Park, Mitchelton (near Brookside shopping centre) to celebrate your love for horses. It’s a relaxed family affair, starting from 11am. BYO picnic lunch and come and join us for cupcakes and share the love! 

There’s still time to host your own Big Heart Day event at home. (And you could win a $100 Myer gift voucher!) So if you can’t make it, drop us an email at charlies-angels@live.com.au and let us know and we’ll help you host your own event. 

Come on… show us your heart!! Help us spread the word of horse welfare, help us spread awareness, raise funds, and most importantly, spread the love!

“There are three reasons why in our view this is a non-viable option (assuming gelded horses are returned to the wild).

1. If even one stallion is left ungelded, that stallion will mate all other females, so full capacity breeding continues and more importantly quickly lead to in-breeding & associated complications. 
2. Geldings & stallions do not mix; stallions hassle and fight the gelding, the gelding has lost fighting edge after gelding so receives serious injuries. 
3. Gelding has infection risks, not to mention costs for trapping, vet bills, anasthaetic etc.

Fertility control for wild horses is important and likely the most humane way to manage excess Brumby numbers. To raise awareness if these issues the ABA hosted a Fertility Control seminar in Brisbane, Nov 2009. While PZP & GonaCon vacines still have a long way to go to cope with the vaste numbers and rougn terrain where Brumbies live wild, we can learn from USA mustang PZP vacines applied by remote dart on a proportion of mares (i.e. vacine enough mares to keep numbers static). 

If anyone wishes to contact me please email me on pickjill@hotmail.com. “ 

(Jill Pickering, President ABA)

Lincoln, almost one year on

One of the most difficult things about running a horse charity is that at some point, you’ll be asked to make life and death decisions. Which horse do you save? Which horse do you pass over? 

When faced with requests to save a horse that is on death row, we take every situation very seriously and always do our best, even if that means all we can do is to post the information on our website and facebook page and hope someone else picks the horse up. 

Every horse we hear about lodges itself into our psyche we continue to think about it for weeks and months and maybe years afterwards… always wondering. What happened? 

The next difficult question that we have to deal with is how much money will we, or can we, invest into a horse? If we have one horse that needs thousands of dollars to rehabilitate, aren’t we taking money away from other horses in need? Is it fair? Does one horse’s right to a new life outweigh the rights of many others? 

Ultimately, the question is: how much is a life worth? 

We realised very early on that we couldn’t play the numbers game. That is, it’s not necessarily ‘better’ to save one hundred horses than it is to save ten. Why? Because there are too many horses in Australia. No matter how many we save, there are hundreds of thousands more waiting to take their place at the slaughterhouse. Since we can’t beat the numbers (quantity), we had to make sure that the horses we could save received the very best (quality) in order to improve their lives. 

I used to be a teacher. And at one point, we had several new students come to the school. These students had special needs and were being integrated into mainstream schooling. The school was required to make many modifications to buildings, costing many thousands of dollars. Many parents and teachers were upset by this, saying that it was unfair. It was then that I heard a new definition of equality: “Equality does not mean that every person is treated the same. Equality means that every person receives whatever they need in order to have the same opportunities in life.” 

At Charlie’s Angels, we’ve adopted this definition. Is it fair to spend thousands of dollars rehabilitating one horse? Yes, if it means that horse gets whatever it needs in order to have the same opportunity to find its loving forever home. How much is a life worth? Whatever it takes.

It is not up to us to place judgement on a horse that is in a world of emotional and psychological pain and say that it isn’t “worth” spending the money to rehabilitate it. All life is valuable. All life is equal. And we will fight to the very end to make sure that the horses that are lucky enough to come into our care receive whatever they need in order to go back out into the world, stronger, wiser, healthier and healed. It’s the best we can do.

Kyra

Timmy, 20 y.o. Thoroughbred, needing urgent eye surgery

Update: Timmy is being picked up this afternoon and will be in care by tonight. Hopefully the vet will be out first thing tomorrow morning to tell us exactly what we need to do. Hold on Timmy… we’re going as fast as we can!!

Charlie’s Angels was approached yesterday by Timmy’s owner to take him on, as he’s needing urgent eye and dental surgery. We are currently working on plans to get Timmy into foster care, where he can receive the treatment he needs. This is obviously going to be expensive surgery, so we urgently need funds to help Timmy and get him on his way. If you can help us to help Timmy, please donate now towards his rescue. Thank you

pic courtesy Animals Australia

Brumbies. They seem to be in the news all the time. They’re either being culled, the call has been made to cull them, or people are trying to stop the culls.

We question how long this will go on before someone steps up and takes responsibility for them. It is unacceptable to allow these horses to continue to breed and then kill them on mass. Remember, it is our fault that they are there in the first place.

Brumbies do environmental damage. But so do cattle, the likes of which there are many times more of.

Those that round up brumbies, train them and on-sell them are doing good work. But it is not sustainable. Brumbies will keep breeding. It isn’t possible to keep up with them.

Please, we urge all levels of government to take this seriously. We urge all stakeholders to take this seriously. Geld and release is a viable, long-term option, that allows the brumbies to live out their lives and stops their populations from rising, and eventually creating a fall in their numbers naturally.

It is such an obvious, simple answer. So why hasn’t it been done?

Money can’t be the answer. So many people feel so strongly about brumbies that they would happily donate to geld a colt or stallion. It CAN be done. The money is there. But someone has to take responsibility for this and organise it. Brumbies are a national issue so it needs a national approach, eventually. But start somewhere.

We urge you to write to your local member and ask him or her to take this issue to government with this simple and achievable aim: geld and release.

We see this as a step backwards for horse welfare; however, we are also of the belief that the slaughter and consumption of other animals such as cows, pigs and sheep is equally distressing. All animals are sentient beings and to argue otherwise is species-ist.

Furthermore, Australia has long been slaughtering horses for human consumption. It’s just that the meat is then exported offshore for consumption in Japan and Europe. One has to question what the difference is in eating horse meat in Australia versus eating it overseas. It is all distasteful and we’d rather none of it happened at all. But to close our eyes to the export of horsemeat will not make it go away. Stopping this butcher from selling horsemeat will not make horse slaughter go away.

Charlie’s Angels is naturally unhappy with the Western Australian government’s decision to allow this to happen. Many of our members work actively to raise awareness of farming practices across the board, so this is particularly frustrating as it feels like yet another animal that we need to fight for.

Unfortunately, overturning the ruling of the consumption of horse meat in Australia will not stop the slaughter of horses that continues every week in this country. More to the point, it only further supports our belief that we must address the root cause of excess horses in this country that allows the practice to continue — namely, the breeding of horses for monetary motivations.

Nevertheless, we are terribly, terribly sad about this news and we would certainly be pleased to see this decision overturned.

To summarise, the sale of horse meat for human consumption is a step backwards; however, overturning this decision isn’t a step forwards. Horses in Australia will still be slaughtered for human consumption, just as they were two weeks ago, so we must continue to work against slaughter in general.

Rallen and Windy’s owner sadly has to find a new home for her horses due to her own ill-health. This is a very sad case and we need to find a loving forever home for both Rallen and Windy to go to together. Rallen and Windy have been with their owner since they were yearlings so we very much need their new owner to be someone who can understand how truly difficult this must be for their current owner.

Both horses are retired and are to be companion horses only. They have always had regular farrier work and annual dentistry. Their worming is up to date. These horses have no known health issues. They wear rugs and need to be seen to twice daily, fed, brushed, lovingly cared for. They get lucerne in the mornings, and a mix of lucerne chaff, pellets, fruit, etc. in the evenings. Both horses love treats and are very affectionate.

The horses are located in Oceanview, near Dayboro, SE Qld. For more information please call Eileen on 07 3352 3108 / 0404 085 768 / eileenmclean251@gmail.com.

Get involved: 

1. Host an event at home or at work (anywhere in Australia!). Bake cupcakes; arrange your cupcakes artistically in a heart shape; raise funds for Charlie’s Angels’ horses; send us photos of your cupcakes and events and you could win a $100 Myer gift voucher! 

2. Join us for a picnic in the park. Sunday, 1st August from 11am. Teralba Park, Mitchelton. Bring your friends and family and your picnic lunch for a fun day celebrating the horses we love. Share some cupcakes, maybe win a “Lucky Park Prize”, and enjoy the Brisbane winter sunshine! 

To find out more, visit our Big Heart Day webpage or phone Jo on (07) 41700215. If you want to host your own event, email us at charlies-angels@live.com.au and we can send you a starter kit to get you going.

Cody, 4-year-old Warmblood set for the doggers for being "dangerous and useless", saved from slaughter

Do you have any good quality artworks just “hanging around” that you would like to donate for sale to help raise funds for horse rescue? Would you like to join us for a yummy three-course dinner at a quality vegan restaurant? Is it time to change your decor at home and pick up something fresh for your walls?

Dinner will be held at Loving Hut, Saturday 24th July at 6.30pm, 1420 Logan Road, Mt Gravatt. Come enjoy new taste sensations, enjoy the company of friendly people, maybe pick up some new artwork in our silent auction, possibly receive the lucky door prize, or buy some raffle tickets. It’s a great night out to share with friends so why not get a group together and have some fun.

Tickets are $35 per person and must be bought prior to the night. Email charlies-angels@live.com.au for payment options or to donate artworks, or phone Jo on (07) 41700215 for more information.

Thanks for supporting our horses and helping to spread the word of cruelty-free living!