Horsing around

We went through to Hapton - which is about 5 miles from our house - to visit Redwings Horse Sanctuary today, as I've been threatening to do this since we arrived in Long Stratton.   Redwings is only open to the public on a few rare occasions in the year when entry is free.  The Hapton branch is Redwings' headquarters with a horse hospital on site and many other facilities, it spans acres and acres of land - paddocks all over the place.   It is a horse sanctuary for over 1,200 horses, ponies, donkeys and mules and all funded by donations.   Redwings take in abandoned, abused, maltreated horses, ponies etc. even tiny baby foals and after a period of adjustment, hospitalisation and full-time care (in most cases), many of the animals are re-homed.  

Here's some of the photos and a little video of the Redwings girls showing re-habilitated horses, which I have to upload through YouTube as it's not loading through Blogger. 

Walking through from the car park

Stables are to the left, as well as the horse hospital, operating room and recuperation room.  More stables on the right and further in.

 A couple of little Shetland ponies in the rehabilitation area. Some of these animals had been picked up wandering in the road, malnourished and close to death.  One pony, Matty, was quite a celebrity - he was only 49kg's when they picked him up but is now looking very good.  I didn't take a photo of him though as he had his back to all the people.

Each Horse has a nameplate and description of his circumstances, his age etc. on the individual stalls.

This is Prince, he is a Cross-Shire - what a beauty! 

Look at the size of those feet!

Prince in the sunlight - image taken from another source on the Interweb

 And the following pics are of the enormous pedigreed Shire Horse 'Fusilier' - standing just over 18 hands ... what a magnificent animal and so gentle.   His hooves were covered in special bandages, as he has a problem with the dampness in the fields and needs moisturiser on his hooves, to stop them getting swollen and damaged.   He is a wonderful horse and it was worth going to the sanctuary just to see him up close. 

He liked my camera, inspected it a couple of times and at one point, I thought he might take a munch.

Fusilier and companions - this is another Internet sourced image - to show his size.

 Missy all ready to do some grooming.  

We watched this horse being braided and dressed up in his Red Nose and Antlers for the display.

Ewan is still quite sick but he braved the cold and seemed to enjoy himself, despite us having to blow his nose every five minutes.

A lovely young girl who was so kind and helped Faye with the grooming earlier - she featured in the video with this horse, who is still being rehabilitated.

I'll put the video up here as soon as I've got it processed through YouTube.