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!
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Tansy's hoof rehabilitation took around 8 months
arrived with significant seedy toe (white line disease) that required eight months of hoof rehabilitation.
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:
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.
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.
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!!!
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?
Fraser (named after the Fraser Fir Christmas tree) and his mum Holly (named after, well, Christmas holly), at the Gympie sales. Help us reach more horses by joining the Mission 100 by Christmas Day!
We have this crazy idea and we need your help to do it!
Our goal is to have 100 people committed to supporting our horses for JUST $2.50 per WEEK!! Per week! And we want to do it by Christmas!!! Yes, in just 10 days!!!
Can you help? Can you help spread the word? Basically, you can probably scrape $2.50 in shrapnel out of your car each week. Let’s face it, it’s less than a cup of coffee, a chocolate block or a bus fare. It’s less than a beer. Or a pack of cigarettes, or a magazine, or even some newspapers and most Instant Scratch-Its. It’s around the price of on sushi roll. Or the price of one banana, these days.
100 people by Christmas. It’s a bit of a leap from where we are right now (30 people), but if we didn’t dream big we wouldn’t be rescuing horses 
We believe the magic of Christmas is on our side. Start the clock… we’re counting!
Go to our donations page to see how you can take the $2.50 pledge and help us reach Mission 100 by Christmas day. HINT: If you make it as $10 a week, you’ll save on bank fees and our overworked bookkeeper won’t go crazy! 
Sadly, this is probably the most common question we are asked 
People call us or email us because there is a horse near them that is abandoned or neglected or abused and they’ve tried calling the people they think they should call for help but nothing has been done. Then they call the next authority on the list, then the next, and each one says it’s not their responsibility and passes them to the next organisation, which the person has already called, and the poor horse suffers and keeps deteriorating while organisations fight over who is responsible. It’s a heartbreaking and frustrating cycle.
Firstly, Charlie’s Angels Horse Rescue has no legal power or authority to intervene in a horse welfare case. Horses are considered ‘property’ under the law (just like a car or a couch or a laptop). So unless the legal owner of a horse voluntarily surrenders the horse to us, we cannot physically take any action.
But don’t give up! These situations can come to resolution just by being persistant and making enough noise. And being patient.
Make no mistake. Horses die in backyards while everyone passes the buck to someone else. At the end of the day, you might find that you are the only person fighting for the horse. Horses need angels and advocates everywhere. Don’t give up! You could be the only one standing between the horse and a long, suffering demise. The horse needs your help.
