Good morning and welcome back December! We have a cold yet sunny start to the day!
Continuing Irie’s story that we started yesterday….
We leave the animals we rescue in the auction house overnight. For this particular auction, we leave MA around 5am and drive to PA in plenty of time to perform the walk through assessments. The flip side of this is that we’re not in the best state physically or mentally to drive home after the auction has ended.
This break in proceedings allows us the time to have the vet perform the Coggins Test, the Vet Cert and give a tetanus shot. Since most people take their purchases home right after the auction, the pens are pretty empty and less frenetic. We make sure everyone, including animals that are not ours, have access to ample water and hay. Bringing our own feed with us ensures we start our feed program ASAP! All grains and legumes are fed soaked as a matter of course to ensure maximum water in take year round! Water intake is key here since it wards off all sorts avoidable issues.
As an aside, whisky is commonly know as the water of life. If you’d like to be fancy, Uisge Beath is the Scottish Gaelic term! We’re not fancy so we just use plain old H2O but if we want to be a wee bit fancy, we use hot water in winter!
Up early the next morning to ensure the animals have been fed, watered and hayed. If they accept a halter, we take them out, in hand, to stretch their legs and get some fresh air. If they don’t accept a halter easily, we know we’re about to have an interesting morning! I must admit, I don’t think I can recall a travel day morning that hasn’t been interesting!
Loading the rescues into the trailer does not follow our principles in animal handling. We need them loaded in the safest, most time efficient manner possible. We train them to load once we get home but for now, time is of the essence and this saying clearly falls on deaf ears because the animals rarely comply! This really comes as no surprise given that many have been on the auction circuit for a while and the inside of a trailer holds no comfort or security. We also rescue animals who probably have only been on a trailer once and that was to travel to auction! Here we find ourselves in another situation not for the faint hearted!
Irie needs modifications for travel. We don’t know her well but we know we need to provide an enclosed area with no obstacles. Fortunately we have a stallion stall on the trailer which means the partition goes all the way down to the floor to create a secure oasis away from other animals and hooves!
Once we’re all safely loaded, the trip home revolves around water stops, hay top ups and reorganizing the animals on the farms! Eight hours of problem solving, arranging, rearranging and the ripple of excitement caused by bringing home animals that will challenge us is a wonderful way to while the time away!
Irie, with her sight impairment, will be the first animal of her kind that I have worked with. Lots of learning which, as we all know, is the life force that keeps us moving forward!
