07-09-08

Wow, it has happened, $10,000 raised for the rescue and care of this July 13th auction rescue. We have never had this big of a budget, and we cannot thank each and everyone of you that made this possible. A big Thank You to Tina G for topping off this fundraising and a big thank you to All Roads Communications for matching the donations.

We called the owner of the neighbouring 10 acres to ask if we could put the evacuated horses out there and he was quite agreeable. The horses enjoyed getting out of our smaller pen they stayed in overnight into a bigger pasture. This also made it possible to take in more evacuees today. Just a side note: the person that used to run horses on the neighbouring 10 acres, who is also a neighbour, is causing a huge ruckus and we had to get 2 sheriff patrol cars out here at 10:30 pm to keep the peace and make him behave and understand this is an emergency situation. FYI, this neighbour has to cross NER's property to get his horses to the neighbours pasture. We had full permission from the owner of the property to use it.

Claire joined in the evacuation efforts today. She brought 3 horses down from the Paradise fires.

Claire left her rig at the rescue and headed up to the Concow fires with Tawnee. There were 2 horses that had been led over 3 miles to escape the flames. Yesterday animal rescues tried to load them, but one of the horses refused. Earlier in the day Claire had gone up to try to get them but was unable to so she brought the other 3 horses down instead from the Paradise fire. There are fires everywhere! This called for the 10 horse trailer. Tawnee had to get fuel again for the 3rd time in 2 days.

Tawnee and Claire made it up to Concow with the heavy sound of helicopter blades in the air dowsing the fire with water. The black horse on the left didn't want to load into the big trailer either. We gave her a sedation which helped mellow her out and help take the stress off. Tawnee finally ended up backing up to a chute and she finally gave up the fight and hopped into the trailer. She's very strong willed, hopefully, she has decided that trailers are a good thing to hop into.

It was a hard temporary goodbye for the horses owners, but they know that they have come to safety. The horses should be going back to their home or other arrangements soon. It's so hard to fathom knowing you may lose everything, having perfect strangers come up and take away your beloved horses, leaving you behind.

Jason took Claire's rig and delivered one of the evacuated horses to a friend-of-the-owners house this evening, while Tawnee and Claire were still up in the Concow area working on evacuating the horses.
More horses were spotted in the Concow area in a privately owned sanctuary. The horses, donkey's and mules, a total of 6, had seen too much abuse in their days to allow us to get near them, and with night falling they could not be loaded up and Tawnee and Claire were forced to leave them behind. They had over 20, and the rest were already evacuated and these 6 were the only ones they were unable to get loaded.

Tawnee and Claire got back to the rescue about 9:45 and got the latest evacuees unloaded and settled in the for the night. Now our total evacuee stats have gone up: 17 equines, 3 dogs, 2 goats, 1 cockatiel.

Again, thank you for making the auction rescue the best funded ever! We are trying to juggle everything around between the auction rescue and the evacuees. The current thoughts are that the auction rescue horses will be taken directly to our foster home in Gridley until we can get the evacuees back home. Please continue to pray for the fire victims big and small.