In Loving Memory…
This page is dedicated to those who lost their battle while with us at the sanctuary. It is with a heavy heart that I need to create this page, but those that work in rescue know its not always happily ever after for our beloved animals. Here I would like to honour those loving souls that I had to help at the end of their journey….
Annie - You stole the hearts of everyone you met
RIP 23rd January 2024
How do I even start to write Annie’s story. Annie came into our lives full of hope and strength, she had obvious advanced laminitis but we had many strategies that had worked with our other ponies and with the help of our vet we came up with various different treatment plans to help realign and lift her rotated pedal bone. But alas, after 18 months of feeling like we would take one big step forward and then a bunch of small steps backward we did follow up radiographs that showed little to no improvement at all - she was too far gone - our hearts sank and we knew the final steps we now needed to take to ensure that Annie didn’t spend another day struggling with her chronic pain. Every day that she was in my care she was on pain management, but towards the last few weeks of her time with us it just wasn’t cutting it any longer. I made the absolutely heart wrenching decision to let her have a peaceful passing surrounded by the people she knew and loved. She gorged herself on apples and carrots leading up to the ‘time’ and passed peacefully with a mouth full of smooshy apple thinking of nothing else other than the tasty apple in her mouth. We will always feel like we failed Annie, but in truth, the people that came WAY before our time with her are the ones who failed her, by the time we had her in our care they had already allowed the damage to go so far that we couldn’t reverse it. Rest well our baby girl, you left a big hole in our hearts.
Eddy - Rest well beautiful boy
RIP 4th December 2021
Eddy, this big boy was a standardbred ex-pacer that found himself in the online auctions, he had such a low reserve with no bids so i snapped him up so he could have a second chance at life ❤ Eddy was absolutely beautiful with a slightly pushy behaviour to keep you on your toes. He was always a tad underweight but nothing too dramatic, so I didn’t think much of it other than to keep feeding him adequately. Eddy had made such good progress he wasn’t far off being listed for adoption when he suddenly came down with what we believed to be colic. We managed to overcome that bout of colic with some pain relief and gentle walking, he went back to normal. A week later and he came down again with the same colic symptoms, a quick phone call to the vet and we treated him accordingly.. rather than improving this time he rapidly got worse, I rushed our Eddy to the nearest Equine Specialist Hospital where it was discovered that this poor gentle giant had somehow ruptured his stomach, we suspect due to an underlying tumour that had weakened everything, it was impossible to treat and would have been practically impossible to have discovered (it was discovered during his autopsy) I had to say goodbye to Eddy that night and I still wish there was more that I could have done for my big boofy boy.
Betty- Rest well beautiful girl
RIP 2nd June 2021
Oh Betty-boo…. this previous little baby girl was only 2 years old when she lost her battle. She had been churned out by the industry and left at a pound to fend for herself with a paralysed tail and badly broken hock. We took this precious little girl in and soon realised how badly damaged her body was. She began hydrotherapy, cold laser and pain management to try and rehabilitate her broken body. I thought we were making progress until while in her foster home she seems to keep losing control of her bladder more frequently - that was the first sign - then one day while at the sanctuary Betty suddenly lost the ability to use her back legs/hips altogether. She was rushed to the vet and we thought we may have been dealing with her ingesting rat poison, but it turns out she was also suffering from her blood not being able to clot and she was slowly coming out with bruises. Rushing her to the Animal Referral Hospital was the next step where we determined it wasn’t poison at all, but it was whatever injury happened to her in her short lived racing career that was raising its ugly head to take her away from us. I made the absolute heart-breaking decision to have her kindly euthanaised to end her suffering. I still have Betty’s ashes and one day might be strong enough to bury them here at the sanctuary.