We are blessed with a wonderful herd of volunteers of all ages who really recognize that the quality of their work is the quality of the horse’s life. We use pellet bedding for easy cleaning, so much less waste, easier storage (we can hold about 250 bags in our shed, shavings take much more space). But our old Belgian at 33y.o and 2000lbs he had begun to get pressure sores, no matter how thickly we bedded his stall. Taina’s feet hurt when they get cold, so while it’s more expensive, more work, and super inconvenient for us, we have added plenty of fluffy shavings to give them a soft, warm place to sleep. Inconvenience or extra work for us is the difference between spending their nights in pain or in comfort, getting good rest or suffering. To us, this isn’t even a question. Our volunteers go the extra mile to ensure our horses aren’t just cared for well, but also have plenty of enrichment, training, and fun. I couldn’t be more proud and grateful for our crew.
EE Horses
These are stories about the horses at our rescue
My friend is dying and i’m pretending to be brave
Butterfly – A Horse’s Value
A Call For Help
Today we put out a plea for help, our rescue has been hit by an awful disease and our animals are at risk. The treatment is long and expensive, but our horses have great hope of full recovery. With your help we can treat all the sick horses and put up preventative measures to protect our horses in the future.
To donate:
https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=DRFP7SLE3LCE6
The disease:
EPM (Equine Protozoal Myeloencephalitis) is a parasite that is carried by possums and eliminated in their waste. When this lands in a field where horses graze, or is cut for hay, or lands in hay storage or grain storage, it can pass on to the horse. While most scavengers that carry this parasite remain unbothered, it can have deadly results in horses. The parasite creates a home in the horse’s brain and spinal cord, causing damage that results in neurological problems severe enough to end a horse’s life. The problem with this horrible disease is that it can display a wide variety of ways and if often discredited as something else or overlooked as a weird quirk or behavioral problem. Many of these horses end up in rescues because they become unable to be ridden. The horses often look clumsy, lazy, discoordinated, or have strange behavioral quirks that are hard to diagnose. After trying many different ways to help their horses owners often give up or just dismiss these quirks as behavioral problems. This disease has relatively recently been understood and needs a great deal further research to fully understand it. There are still very few treatment options available. Traditional dewormers are not effective enough to protect our horses because they do not break through the blood/brain barrier to clean the parasites out of the spinal cord. Unfortunately this means the treatments available are expensive. More on this here: https://aaep.org/horsehealth/epm-understanding-debilitating-disease
Our horses:
We aren’t sure when or how our horses were exposed, because so little is known about this disease it’s rarely checked for and poorly understood, even by vets. Several of our horses could have had problems with this disease long before arriving here at our rescue, it may even be part of why they ended up here. However we don’t know for sure they weren’t exposed here. While we have a clean farm with carefully maintained pastures, we do have a high population of possums in our area. We also buy our hay locally, which may have been contaminated. We have safe hay storage in our clean loft. But every year at the end of winter we often run out of our hay stores and need to buy hay from wherever we can get it to make ends meet until local hay is cut for the first time in the spring. We have no way of knowing if these sources of hay have had any contamination.
Who’s been exposed?
Zephyr was the first horse who introduced us to this disease. He came to us with rather classical neurological symptoms. Upon tested he was graded as stage 2 neurological, which could be caused by any damage to the spinal cord. Most things that damage a horse’s spinal cord are untreatable and often life-ending, if not they remain fairly disabled for life. We were very lucky to have a vet with experience with EPM and encouraged us to test for this, and he came back positive. He’s 2 months into his treatment and doing really well. While he’s still neurological he has shown major improvements in his quality of life. He can now roll, run and play with his best friend Oro, and is settling down as his nervous system is no longer under attack and can begin to heal. While we’ll likely end treatment at the end of 3 months, it may take up to a year to see full healing of his spinal cord. We are very optimistic for his future. While he may not be able to be ridden he should be able to live a full and comfortable life. His medicine has costs us $600 for 3 months, equaling $1,800.
Taina is our starvation case rescue Paso Fino mare, she came to us seriously debilitated and suffering greatly having just miscarried a baby. We promptly discovered she also had Lyme disease and had neurological issues we had attributed to this. While her comfort level greatly increased with treatment of Lyme and a healthy diet. However she still had strange quirks, she is extremely emotional and prone to violent outbursts, attacking her stall walls, she also presents with spasms that look like small seizures. We know this is related to nerve pain but aside from pain killers we had no way to help her. After learning about Zephyr we decided to test her on a hunch. Sure enough she came back a high positive as well for EPM. Lyme and EPM often come hand-in-hand because the horse’s system is compromised by one allowing the other a way in, while a healthy horse may fight off one or the other independently. While we have debated calling this an end to expensive treatments to save Taina, we see the light at the end of the tunnel for this precious girl. She has fought so hard and overcome so much, we can’t give up on her now that we have a diagnosis and treatment option. Her treatment costs $900 a month for 3 months, totaling $2,700.
We also decided to test Wisp when we learned about this disease, she has always been unbalanced and discoordinated. We attributed this to her being a big, clumsy Clydesdale and not really paying attention. But she had great muscle atrophy along her topline, which was strange because her sister Fable does not, even though they live the same lifestyle. So why does Wisp struggle to maintain muscle? She had a serious fight with Lyme disease which almost claimed her life a few years ago, we believe this is how a lingering parasite found it’s way into her spine. Her test came back positive as well. Her treatment is about $1300 a month, we are deciding whether to go for 2 or 3 months with her lower test results. So $4,600-$6,900
When these horses came back positive we decided to test a few more. It’s very common for a whole herd to be infected if the exposure happened here, especially because all of our rescues were previously compromised at some point in their lives.
Fable has more mild symptoms, she has similar extreme emotions that we see in Taina and similar nerve pain situations. We are chronically checking her teeth because she chews strangely and has trouble swallowing. She is also very sensitive to grooming. Her test came back highly positive!
Tank has always had fear issues and had a long battle with Lyme disease, so we decided to test her too. It turns out her eye and lip drooping and chronic drooling has been related to EPM damaging her spine, obviously more in her face than her hind end like other horses. Though hind end symptoms are beginning to become apparent now.
Marshmallow is our shetland mare who has always had serious problems with her hind end. If she were a large horse this would be seriously debilitating, but getting her weight down, our wonderful equine chiropractor, and keeping her in a healthy situation has kept her comfortable. We had attributed this nerve damage from her times pregnant and carrying many babies that were too large for her. However she came back highly positive. We are relieved that this is treatable, but sad that it took us so long to find her underlying problem.
We also decided to test our young mustang, Oro, as we’ve owned him since he was 9 months old. We were hoping this would help let us know if the exposure happened at our farm. But his levels came back extremely low, like he was exposed but his healthy system fought it off without our help.
With all our horses we are so relieved to finally know what’s going on, the underlying problems that were damaging their quality of life. Several years ago we lost a young horse, Viking, to what we believed was Wobblers, a hereditary neurological disorder, he was the son of Marshmallow and a Gypsy Vanner stallion. We believed his poor breeding of a very small mother to a very large father is what cause his conformational damage to his spine. Now that veterinary research has progressed and we’ve learned about this disease, I’m devastated to think that maybe this was his problem. However his neurological damage was rather extreme and it was unlikely he would have survived even with treatment. We are grateful this hasn’t happened again with any of our horses, and hopeful that we have caught this disease before the damage became too much to overcome.
All this being said we are facing vet bills bigger than anything we’ve ever faced before. This coming at a time when things are tight enough. We beg for your support at this difficult time. We know everyone is struggling so we appreciate anything you have to offer. Every penny will go towards our vet bills and ensure full and appropriate treatment for our horses in need. We are eternally grateful to our wonderful supporters!
Quality
“Our quality of work is their quality of life”
This is a common quote in animal and human care related jobs. It’s vital we remember this key point. It’s easy to get lost in our daily life, letting our mood or distractions reduce our quality of work. This is fairly typical in all jobs, especially when we are an employee or volunteer in a care position, it’s easy to say “it’s just a job/volunteer, it doesn’t have to be perfect”. In most jobs we need to remember a healthy work/life balance and not let our job overwhelm us or take over our lives, it’s just a job! But in a care position it takes a little more than that. The thing is, it’s not just a job when you are a caretaker – it is our animal’s whole life.
Our animals spend their lives at the mercy of our care, if we don’t feel like cleaning, if we are too busy to toss some extra hay, if we just aren’t up for cleaning and refilling their water – our horses go hungry, live in filth, or even become ill. They can’t just go get food elsewhere or refill their own water buckets. While there are some tools and ways to set up the animal’s environment for ease of care. But even with the best set up and nicest tools, everything still needs care. The tools need to be maintained, food needs to be dished out, items need to be cleaned, and waste needs to be removed.
We are blessed with a wonderful herd of volunteers of all ages who really recognize that the quality of their work is the quality of the horse’s life. We use pellet bedding for easy cleaning, so much less waste, easier storage (we can hold about 250 bags in our shed, shavings take much more space). But our old Belgian at 33y.o and 2000lbs he had begun to get pressure sores, no matter how thickly we bedded his stall. So while it’s more expensive, more work, and super inconvenient for us, we have added plenty of fluffy shavings to give him a soft place to sleep. Inconvenience or extra work for us is the difference between spending his nights in pain or in comfort, getting good rest or suffering. To us, this isn’t even a question. Our volunteers go the extra mile to ensure our horses aren’t just cared for well, but also have plenty of enrichment, training, and fun.
Sometimes however, our volunteers and workers get burnt out. Caretaking is an exhausting job, physically and emotionally. When the work is hard, our bodies struggle to keep up, and in rescue, sometimes even if we do the best we can, we can’t fix everything. Sometimes our horses struggle with health or pain issues, sometimes they don’t appear very grateful for our hard work, sometimes even with everything we do, they still pass away. This can be a very defeating and draining job. It’s important to take care of ourselves, remain grateful for our workers, and to support each other throughout the hard times. We are in this field together with the same goal of providing a great life for our animals.
A Horse Who is Loved is Never Wasted
A horse who is loved is never wasted.

Why should we ever let a horse who is loved leave the safe comfort of loving arms just because someone else might benefit from using them for sport? There is no benefit for the horse. Keep your horses, regardless of their competitive potential, you are meeting their greatest potential for HAPPINESS. Rather than measuring a horse’s life as successful based on a competitive career, we really ought to measure it based on how happy their life was spent. Spending it home with their loved ones and all their needs met, can’t get much better than that.
No Longer Your Beast of Burden
Horses are no longer a Beast of Burden. Modern countries no longer rely on horses for labor or transportation. Horses are now purely a leisure and entertainment animal. While our sports mimic old jobs and times of war where horses had previously given their lives, this is no longer necessary. No job done “just for fun” or entertainment should cost the life or wellbeing of an animal. I would say the same for humans, except humans are capable of understanding the risks and potential consequences of participating in extreme sports and dangerous activities – animals can’t understand these concepts in order to consent to the risk. Horses were used as tools of work, sport, and warfare since we domesticated them thousands of years ago, transitioning the harsh tools we used on them to manipulate them in a variety of clever new ways. Turning livestock nose rings into bits, adding spurs to sharpen our boot heels, using wide variety of whips, chains and pressure-point knots used to inflict pain and control these animals. Being manipulated, controlled, and used their whole life, then used for breeding and eventually destroyed when they are no longer useful. Our excuse was “it’s necessary” for food, labor, and warfare. So we accepted these necessary evils.
Before pictures:
This is no longer necessary.
It’s time we, as a modern society, decide to stop this cycle of abuse and disposal of animals. For the sole purpose of entertainment and sport.
The number of horses cycling into slaughter houses because they are old, lame, sick, or unable to be ridden, or because they no longer compete up to the standard the owner had aspired to. These horses are used up and thrown out. Often these horses were believed to have been given to “safe” retirement homes, “Free to Good Home” is a death sentence for animals. So we as a culture need to stand against this. Make this socially unacceptable. Whenever you work with a horse, whenever you pay to interact with a horse, whenever your child goes to riding lessons or summer camps, when you buy a horse, when you lease a horse, anything, make sure this horse is SAFE for life. So many stables for competition, lessons, trails, pony rides, camps, and so on use their horses as long as they can and immediately dispose of them when they’re no longer able to do the job. This happens all the time, in all parts of country. Even if the owners tell you “Oh no, we send them to a good retirement farm”, we all know that’s as true as when our parents told us our puppy went to live in a “farm up north”. We need to hold our society accountable for this. Even if it means that owners must make the decision to humanely euthanize these horses. Even though this is not kind, death is not a welfare issue, death is not suffering. When they leave a home they are not just at risk of getting a bad home – but much more likely for those who are un-useable, is that they will end up bouncing auction to auction until they end up on the slaughter pipeline where they are shipped repeatedly until they make it over the border to Mexico where they are slaughtered. If they survive the trip, they do suffer the whole way. So while I believe anyone who uses a horse should be responsible for them until their appropriate end of life, if that must be cut short it should be done in the least awful way, the least suffering, humane euthanasia in the arms of loved ones.
Our community has got to make it unacceptable to dispose of old, broken, sick, or used up animals. This needs to be no longer ok. This means everyone must do their part to make sure the horses they use are safe.
After pictures to return some comfort to your heart:
Alternative Equine Lifestyles
It takes a special type of person to turn away from society’s norms and work to change the world for the better. It’s very easy and comfortable to live a life within traditional expectations, gender roles, following the rules, and keep your questioning to yourself. It can be difficult, painful, and rather isolating to step outside that box, even if it’s for the better. I believe this barn became the ethical, forward-thinking, animal care facility it is because it’s run by those people who have walked outside normality. I am proud to be a part of such a beautiful group of humans and animals.
“Never, never be afraid to do what’s right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society’s punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way” – Martin Luther King Jr. Continue reading →
R+ Kids and Horses Belong Together
The Responsibility of Love
One of the most frustrating things I hear in the rescue world when people get rid of their animals is, “they can no longer earn their keep”. This is a very outdated way of thinking. There was a time when animals served humans as essentially, slaves, they labored, they suffered, they were used until they could no longer be used, then they were killed and used for their parts. This baseline assumption is a huge problem – the idea that animals owe us their lives, their labor, their bodies, and then still ask for their affection? The idea sounds absurd when we look at it from the outside, when we take out our personal bias. If we were to look at another culture doing the same actions to another species we would see our hypocrisy (for example when people get upset over the abuse, labor, and consumption of dogs, cats, and exotic animals in Asian wet markets).
We could debate forever the ethics of using animals for labor, for their products, or for their meat. I’m not going to get into that – but I encourage everyone to look at this topic deeply and think about it with your brain and heart and come to your own conclusions that you feel good about.
I’m here to talk about the choice to own, ride, and commit to our horses in particular. These poor animals fall everywhere from livestock to family member. Regardless of where they land on your sliding scale, most people have an assumption of labor for their horses. They expect to be able to ride, drive, or compete with their horses. Why get a horse if not to ride? Just get a dog if not, right? Horses aren’t just expensive pasture ornaments. But what’s in it for the horse to do so?
I think it’s time in modern society to shift our mindset when it comes to horses – it’s time for a change. Horses should no longer be expected to work or expected to conform to human goals, competitions, or aspirations. But the shift I’m asking for isn’t huge. I’m not going to tell people to stop riding their horses or working their horses – but rather shift our mindset to appreciation. We should now appreciate when our horses choose to participate with us, we should appreciate when they help us reach our goals.
There is a huge difference in this mindset of expectation vs. appreciation. When we expect something and it’s not delivered (for whatever reason) we feel betrayed, let down, and justified in breaking up a relationship. It’s as though they aren’t upholding their end of a deal or bargain – but there was no contract, they didn’t know the deal. When we appreciate instead of expect, we go in with no presumptions, no goals, nothing to lose, so everything they offer we can be grateful for. We can recognize the gift our horses have given us by choosing to participate and choosing to give us their labor and relationship. These things can be achieved with Positive Reinforcement, to show our horses what we like, what we want more of, and that we are grateful for it. It can also give them the ability to say “this is too much to ask for right now”. It provides the horses a level of consent and agreement. This concept of appreciation vs. expectation can be seen especially when the horse becomes injured, sick, old, or even just unhappy. So often horses are sold, given away, left at auction, or otherwise tossed out simply because they are no longer “useful” to the owner, because the horse is no longer meeting their person’s expectations.
When we think in the realm of expectations, we believe that a horse should do our bidding it puts us in the frame of mind of force, pressure, and even punishment should the animal not comply. While when we think in the realm of appreciation, we believe a horse owes us nothing but they may choose to give to us – this puts us in the frame of mind of reward, reinforcement, praise and signs of appreciation. I do have some degree of expectation to be able to provide my horse full care safely. I want to be able to tend to their hooves, clean their environment, provide enrichment and basic husbandry care – I expect this. I don’t expect them to be perfect and compliant for these things from day one, I expect to be able to work towards this so I can provide them a healthy and appropriate life. I do not expect them to participate in anything that is just for fun, just for me, or cosmetic in anyway, these things I just appreciate when they do participate. I show my appreciation through positive reinforcement (and non-contingent rewards and love!) This becomes a more mutually beneficial and enjoyable relationship for both partners.
When we make the decision to add a horse to our life we owe them a full contract of freedoms (freedom from hunger, thirst, discomfort, pain, injury, disease, fear and distress, and the freedom to express their normal behaviors) with low expectations (the ability to provide them care) and a great deal of appreciation for anything they chose to share with us. This is the responsibility of love, if we choose to love them and add them to our lives, we owe them all this. Ideally this will be for a lifetime partnership – there are situations where we can’t keep them, but it should never be for a horse not fulfilling an expectation they didn’t know about or sign up for.