January

January has been a long month of rainy cold weather, we have only had a few sunny days. This has been hard for everyone at the ranch, equines and staff alike. We all just can't wait for spring to come, it's just a round the corner.

January started out with getting the year end tax-deductible receipts ready to be mailed. This took days and hours of time. 6 people participated in stuffing all the envelopes and getting them ready to be sent off. Finally they were all done!

3 horses were adopted on the 10th. Sadie, Classy and Lassy. They had been saved from the feedlot together and it was nice see them adopted together into a loving home.
Our Trip to Nevada:
We had to go pick up some feedlot horses. We had to deliver Daisy Baby & Buttercup to their new home and then Little Ghazi to his new home. We then had to pick up Jericho and bring him back to our ranch as he was no longer able to stay with his adopters.
Our day started at 4:45 am there was a break in the storm so it was now or who knows when. We headed out to the 20 acre pasture to look for Little Ghazi. He was out there, but where? It's hard to find a dark horse when the sun is not up yet. We got the 4 wheeler out and drove around looking for him and there was no sign of him in the tree filled pasture. Our 4 wheeler is getting older, over worked and pleading for retirement. It has a radiator leak and way out in the pasture it started to die, we had to get it back to the water hose before it really did die. We decided that the 4 wheeler needed to rest, so on foot we headed out to the pasture again and this time we called and whistled for him and in about 2 minutes there he was. Why didn't we do that in the first place? We got him ready to go then we loaded up the donkeys.
They of course didn't want to load up into a big dark trailer, but after a long while of persuasion they decided to load up and we were off.
It was about 40F when we started out and by the time we where up in the high Serra' it was 10F and everything was white with snow - brrr way too cold! Finally after driving on icey, snowy roads for what seemed like forever, we made it safely to Daisy Baby and Buttercup's new home.
From there it was off to pick up the feedlot horses, the snow was gone now, but it was still very cold. On the way there we saw some wild Mustangs up on a hill eating what they could find. It was neat being able to see them. Half way there, heavy fog appeared and we had to drive much slower. Finally we made it to the place to pick up the feedlot horses. When the horses where all safely loaded we headed to Little

Ghazi's new home, through miles of thick fog. We had to unload everyone into their round pen so we could get Little Ghazi out. Then we loaded everyone back up, said good bye to Little Ghazi and headed out again this time to Westwood for Jericho. It was 4:30 PM and we still had almost 300 miles to go before we would be back at our ranch.
It was still heavy fog until we made it out of Susanville and it was about 8:30 PM when we made it to Westwood to pick up Jericho.
Then it was finally off to our ranch, we made it back by 12:00 AM, we had gone over 550 miles that day. We got everyone settled and hit the hay ourselves, it had been such a long, tiring, stressful day, but the horses were safe! They would have been slaughtered if it was not for us.

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We currently have 46 equines at NER, just our hay bill is over $2000.00 per month we are very grateful that our local Wal*Mart donates all their broken bags of livestock feed to us, it really helps out. Adoptions are very slow right now which in turn directly impacts our funds for operations. NER funds mainly come from the adoption fees and with adoptions so slow and with so many horses in our rescue it is scary...
We get so many calls about poor horses out there that people want to donate/surrender, but we can't take in any more horses until the horses we do have start finding homes. It breaks our hearts to get these calls or emails and we have to trun them away. It's so sad... what will happen to them?
The summer of 2007 we were buying hay for $8.00 (Alfalfa), then it went to $9.00 then $10.00 now it's $12-$13 a bale, who knows how much it is going to end up being for a bale before fresh hay is cut in the spring.

The high hay prices are killing horse owners we get calls from people "I don't have money to feed my horse, can you take him?" it is so sad, we can only do what we can and right now that is taking the best care of the horses we have without running completely out of money.
Please, if you can care for a horse or another horse, please consider adopting a horse that needs a home and making a place for another horse to be saved. If you can't adopt a horse please donate to the horse rescue for feed we are all suffering from the high hay prices.

Today is the last day of January and it's still raining, hopefully Febuary weather is better.
Reminder: Only 10 days until the new PETFINDER series is on the TV, watch Mya our rescue feedlot horse!