Petuna the pig is delighted after the last rain storm she discovered that she could turn up the dirt easily by rooting around with her snout.
She seems to quite enjoy herself and we are happy to see her being more active.
When she first came to us she was horribly obese and had a fat roll over her face, where she couldn’t really see she was so fat, it was just covering her eyes, which was causing a lot of eye infections and other eye problems. She also had a hard time walking because she was so obese. The vet said the only way to correct these problems was to lose weight.
Now she spends her days walking around and rooting for goodies buried under the dirt. She is becoming a much healthier pig! She is looking for a home and will make a great addition to any family farm. You never know, you might be able to teach her to be able to play video games, click here.
Brittany is in charge of keeping our online presence updated with all the current information and pictures of the available animals. We work hard to keep the website updated, with additional staff it’s going to be a lot easier to keep the animals information updated. If you are looking to adopt a horse we recommend that you like our Facebook page, nice rideable horses are often placed in adoption pending after they are seen on Facebook before they even make it onto the website. If you haven’t been to our Facebook page yet, check it out. We are the largest Facebook community for horse welfare in the world with over 45,000 fans. To visit our Facebook page, click here.
We had a cute little car drive into the shelter. It was actually a rental car, some people had flown into Sacramento and driven to the shelter.
The special guests were a humane officer, a veterinarian and an animal rescuer who came to see how we run our shelter and discuss how they might be able to duplicate what we are doing in their area. They have a specific mission, to start with, and that is saving senior horses from auctions before they slip into the slaughter pipeline and also doing euthanasia clinics to prevent horses from ending up in the slaughter pipeline. So many older horses are cruelly dumped at auctions, where they enter the slaughter pipeline to a horrible death. No horse deserves this fate, especially older horses who have spent their whole lives serving humanity, just to be dumped when they get too old to work anymore. They met some of the horses that were surrendered for the Last Act of Kindness, and were thankful that they were not dumped at an auction.
They also looked at our equipment to see what our suggestions were for the best rescue equipment to get. We told them that a large stock trailer is a must.
One reason they chose to follow our lead is we embrace and follow the UC Davis International Animal Welfare Institute, Unwanted Horse Assessment for their Animal Intake Protocol. Some people disagree with our decision in following UC Davis’s Unwanted Horse Assessment, but with over 150,000 horses exported to slaughter each year in the US, something humane must be done to help those horses that have no home. If shelters and rescues were open door, following UC Davis’s Unwanted Horse Assessment, no horse would have to endure the horrors of the slaughterhouse. To see the Unwanted Horse Assessment Station workflow, click the picture below.
The group posed for one last picture before they had to leave. The humane officer’s face is blurred to protect his identity as he does a lot of undercover work. He has even gone into horse slaughter houses in Mexico to document the horrors that is seen there. We are excited that there are more groups out there stepping up to show that slaughter is not the option for unwanted horses. The horse community needs to step up and tell the world “Horse slaughter is not an option, we don’t ship our dogs and cats to slaughter, horses are our pets, we will not tolerate them being slaughtered.”
Thank you all for your support!