Windy Hill Farm

09/21/2024

Binx is keeping watch as we get everything ready for tomorrow!

09/20/2024

09/16/2024

Karen is very much enjoying Ruby’s company already ❤️ Ruby you are a gem!

09/16/2024

Meet Ruby!

Ruby comes all the way from College Station WHOOP from a lovely family that rescued her from a kill pen. Ruby was in foal, which in horse lingo means expecting & deemed high risk at that. When her foal arrived earthside, she rejected him, unsure of what he really was, as she herself is only a baby at 2 years old. With the guidance of a vet, they decided to bottle raise her c**t, who is named Aggie. Though things were going well, they could tell Ruby was lonely & came across Karen’s wanted poster… The rest is now history.

On Sunday at our Fall on the Farm event we will not just be welcoming the first day of Fall but Ruby as well! So come help us give Ruby a warm welcome.

09/16/2024

Exciting things are happening here at the farm!

If you follow us on Instagram, you probably saw on our story that we went on an adventure. Boy was it! But before we spill the beans, we wanted to ask… What do y’all think we were up to? Where did we go? Drop your guesses in the comment section below.

Will reveal exactly what we were up to at 2pm!

09/14/2024

GOT ONE 🎉 Tooter isn’t so little anymore!

09/14/2024

Tooter photo fail… Thanks Ash for photo bombing.

09/13/2024

Mornin’ Breakfast 🍳 Who’s breakfast is who? Do you know? Answer is in the comments!

09/13/2024

DONATION INFO

We’ve been getting a lot of questions about donations & how one can help contribute to our small sanctuary. Happy to answer all those questions here!

First off, let me introduce ourselves! We are Windy Hill Farm Animal Sanctuary, & our mission is to give all of God’s creatures, big & small, an earthly safe haven until they are called back home to heaven again. We do NOT hold a 501C3 status; that way, we don’t get restricted by rules or regulations to stir our attention away from what truly matters: the animals. As we are crowdfunded, we rely on donations to help support our cause. With that, there are several ways to contribute!

Down below 👇🏻 In the photos are the animals most used items. You can purchase those items from most feed stores to then bring to our events, where we will have a designated donation drop off area. At the drop off location, you will also find our cash donation box. The money raised from that goes straight towards our hay fund, vet care, farrier costs, & basic farm maintenance.

Not able to attend an event or just rather donate from the comforts of your own home without having to go anywhere? We got you! Come check out our Amazon Wishlist! There you can even add a note at check out to whom exactly you would like your donation gifted to. You can find the wishlist here: https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/2CR42101FWZZ8?ref_=wl_share

Have gently used items such as halters, collars, & things of that nature? We accept those too! What we do NOT accept used are opened feed & food items.

Hope I answered everything! Didn’t touch your question? Not a problem! Send them to us, & I’ll be sure to answer them as best as I can. Also, please don’t feel obligated to donate, especially in order to attend our events. All our events at the moment do NOT require an entrance fee. We know all too well how times now are hard on everyone, so simply come & enjoy the day with us.

Thank you!

09/12/2024

Hello 👋🏻 From Bones & Molly!

09/11/2024

🗺️ Windy Hill Farm Animal Sanctuary: Fall on the Farm

💛 Driving Path

❤️ Parking

💚 Picnic Area

💜 The Sanctuary’s Cottage: Sugar Gliders, Hedgehog, & Bunny viewing area. We do ask when in the cottage to keep voices down as most of our littles are nocturnal & very sensitive to sounds. No food or drinks are allowed in the cottage. Children are NOT allowed to climb into the rabbit’s enclosure. Also, please do NOT open & reach into the sugar gliders or hedgehog’s cage. To see them, please ask a volunteer, & they will be more than happy to help.

🩷 Vendors: View Vendor List

💙 Games: Co****le

🧡 Cattle & Horses Area

We are beyond excited & hope to see y'all all there ☺️

09/11/2024

‼️ Warning ‼️ Long read‼️
This past weekend, I watched an auction and what happened at this auction explained a lot as to why “regular rescues” are struggling financially. It is not because there is no donor money available since there are mass bailing rescues and killpen rescues that are bringing in millions of dollars (yes you read that correctly – Millions of Dollars!)

Yesterday, I read about a Texas rescue shutting down because of lack of donations. This morning, I spoke to another rescue director that’s closing their rescue because of lack of donations. Wherever I look, horse rescues are shutting their doors for lack of donor support. Heck, if our rescue did not have a private foundation helping us, we would have had to shut down last year already. We are the largest Arabian horse rescue in the United States. Let that sink in. We would have to have shut down!

Killpen fundraising and large scale mass bailing “the slaughter truck is coming” fundraising operations are what is suffocating the local “regular horse rescues” financially. There are only so many horse loving donors available, it is a finite number of donors. Regular horse rescues lose donors to the emergency fundraising schemes out there.

If donors have to choose between giving their $20 to a horse that is said to ship to "certain death" if a donation is not received immediately and an owner relinquished horse that a rescue is taking in, the donor will most likely choose the "certain death horse". It is the urgency of the situation, the dire position the horse is perceived to be in, the hard core online pleas that make the donor choose the ”certain death horse” rather than the owner relinquished horse from around the corner. After all, the feeling of “yes, I helped save a horse from death today” feels great to the donors.

And here is the problem! The "certain death horse" is not shipping to its death. It is a marketing ploy to get donations. How do I know this? Stay with me, I will explain.

Do horses ship to slaughter? Yes they do, no question about that. However, when a horse trader/slaughter shipper gets an order for 35-40 horses, they will ship 35-40 horses. They pick the healthy fat young horses to ship to slaughter. The horses that I have personally observed that were in actual ship to slaughter pens waiting on transport, were healthy, young, fat, big horses. This is also backed up by statistics of what horses ship to slaughter. Several years ago, it was fat young quarter horses that were discarded by breeders. Most recently, it has been unhandled young, fat reservation horses that have been rounded up by the thousands and sadly some branded mustangs. But, it was mostly unhandled feral horses that were shipped to slaughter.

They do not ship the skinny old broken horses. Those are fundraised for and sold to line the pockets of the horse traders who wants to make some extra cash. Plus these horses tug at the donors' heart strings and they will open their wallet, so they make an easy fundraising opportunity for killpen and mass bailing organizations.

Why are the slaughter shipping order for 35-40 horses? Because that is how many horses fit into the slaughter shipping trailer and that is how many horses fit on the slaughter manifest paper form. The process of putting a load of 35-40 horses together, requires the horses to be microchipped and listed on a slaughter shipment manifest with gender and age, line by line. This document must be signed off by a veterinarian, certifying that the horses do not have certain illnesses and that they are healthy. Once the veterinarian has signed off the manifest form, it is submitted to the USDA office with a processing fee of $56. The USDA office usually takes two to three business days to process the shipping manifest document and approves it. Once the USDA approval is received, the 35-40 horses can be loaded onto the trailer to be shipped to Presidio, TX or to El Paso, TX where they are dropped off, processed further, and then they are loaded onto another trailer to cross the border into Mexico.

It is a horrible process, no denying that and I break out in tears every time that I see a real manifest that has been processed by USDA and I know that these horses listed were slaughtered. It needs to stop! No question about it. But, I am telling you about this process because donors are duped when they see the fundraising posts that say things like, “donate so that we can get these horses because they ship tomorrow”.

The slaughter horse trader would be committing fraud if he pulled some horses off the slaughter trailer because his paperwork would be incorrect now. The microchip numbers would not match the horses. The signed veterinary certificate would be a falsified document now. And even if this kind of thing was possible, even if the horse trader and the veterinarian were willing to commit fraud, the shipment would now be two horses short and two other horses would have to be found to take the “rescued horses’” place.

And if the horse trader and veterinarian wanted to do things correctly, they would have to cancel the shipment of 35-40 horses and would have to redo the slaughter shipment manifest paperwork and start all over again. This would delay the shipment of the ordered slaughter horses by two to three days and would increase the horse trader’s operating cost.

Do these last minute “rescue the horses from the slaughter truck” fundraisers make sense in light of this information? Yet, donors frantically donate to these kinds of fundraisers.

Most of the posts that you see on social media with “will ship to slaughter” fundraisers are for horses that the horse trader wants to sell to make extra money, these horses were never meant to ship to slaughter. The “last minute ships to slaughter” fundraisers of horses that may look sad, but were never part of the slaughter pipeline either, they are meant to make some extra money for somebody.

But, donors give their money to these types of fundraisers and their local rescues that desperately need donors support go without, even though these rescues keep horses out of harms way in the first place.

I watched videos last weekend of pleas for the horses to be kept off the slaughter truck at a large auction. Thousands of Dollars rolled in. One rescue director walked through the pens saying. “I am here at the killpen auction…” when the first part of the auction is for catalog horses with horses selling for as much as $20,000 and the second part of the auction is for less expensive riding horses. Does the auction house have a slaughter shipping contract? Yes, they do. Do any of the rescues bid against the auction owner when he buys horses in the loose auction portion of the auction weekend? No, they do not. So no matter what, the slaughter shipper/auction owner gets the number of horses for shipping to slaughter and none of the rescues bid against him.

Another rescue director was at the auction buying donkeys for up to $1,000 per donkey. Normally one donkey sells for $50 to $200. Word spread and everyone and their grandmother went looking for donkeys to bring to the sale. Easy money for donkey owners willing to sell their donkeys! But it was donors who funded all of this. This artificially created a supply of donkeys at way above market price. I do not know how many $1,000 donkeys they purchased, but I can tell you that these donkeys had not been in danger of shipping to slaughter in the first place.

Another rescue director featured skinny broken horses to prevent them from shipping to slaughter. As discussed above, they were not slaughter bound horses in the first place. Does a skinny medical type case horse need help. Yes, of course, the horse needs help, but it is done with “ships to slaughter” type fundraising.

Also, when rescues attend auctions to buy skinny sickly horses, word spreads and horse owners and horse traders looking to make a quick profit will find those skinny horses to bring to auction.

We had a case of this in Southern California when a local mass bailing rescue sought out the skinny horses to fundraise for them to keep them from being “shipped to slaughter”. They always attended the same auction and the director was caught making deals with a horse trader to starve a certain horse, so that the horse would be even skinnier the next week. She told him to bring the horse back skinnier because she knew that people would donate more. Fortunately, this rescue was shut down.

But, these practices are reminiscent of the fundraiser videos and posts that I saw last weekend. I am not claiming that this particular rescue at the auction is doing what this Southern California mass bailing director was doing. But it does raise eyebrows.

It is training donors to only give when a horse is presented as in danger of slaughter or at the brink of death.

It trains the donor to ignore the “boring” pleas of regular rescues who want to support an elderly owners, owners in need, law enforcement seizures, and from small local auctions.

I have had someone tell me that taking in an owner relinquished horse was not rescue work. I wonder how many other donors believe the same? Yet, the regular rescues are the ones preventing horses from ending up in the hands of horse traders and so called killpens in the first place.

As time goes on, with more local regular rescues closing their doors because of lack of donations and the few multi-million mass bailing operations being the only ones left, there won’t be safe havens for local horses anymore. Let that sink in.

Yet these mega-mass bailing rescues’ actions are doing nothing to stop horses from shipping to slaughter. They use emotional videos of horses as they are loaded into trailers to squeeze the last dollars out of donors.

The shipments continue. Fortunately, in recent years, slaughter export numbers are down because demand drives supply. But if the Mexican or Canadian slaughter house wants 100 horses, these traders will ship the 100 horses, no matter how much money is paid in donations to “stop the slaughter truck”. The only way to change this and to stop horses being exported to Canada and Mexico is to pass legislation to outlaw it. Period!

09/09/2024

Hi everyone 👋🏻 We are experiencing some technical difficulties getting out our vendor list post & staying put. Not sure if it’s due to spammers having decided they would post over on our event page but, we are hoping to get it all sorted out shortly. Bare with us & thank you for your patience!

09/04/2024

UPDATE (September 16, 2024): A friend by the name of Ruby has been located & found. Thank you everyone for helping!

Karen is once again on the search for a new friend after the recent loss of her buddy, Cherokee. So, we're turning to the power of social media for a helping hoof in finding her a new trusty pasture pal!

Karen’s ideal friend includes:

* A pint size partner, preferably a pony like herself.

* Someone not too advanced in years, as she's only 7 years young & would like a friendship to last a lifetime.

* Speed demons need not apply, as Karen's hoof issues put the brakes on any fast paced adventures.

* Unrideable is NOT a deal breaker to her, as she too is a pasture ornament.

* Most importantly, she’s after a gentle, friendly gelding or mare who would adore her humans, the bigger versions of herself, & the things that go MOO.

If you know of an individual that fits this description & is looking for a new home, please contact us!

A Note from Karen's Humans: Karen is keeping a tight lip about contributing to an adoption fee… Typical horse, am I right? However, though we are on a very tight budget, we are willing to pitch in. Again, if you or someone you know has a mini looking for a furever home that fits Karen’s list of demands, please let us know!

Yours truly, Karen's Farmily at Windy Hill Farm Animal Sanctuary

09/04/2024

For those that have been asking about Karen since Cherokee’s passing she is getting on. Luckily she still has a good healthy appetite but does whinny throughout the day looking for her buddy. She is out with the bigger versions of herself that being Bones, Molly, Pocket, & Windy but not quite the same as she can’t keep up with her wittle legs. I know for all of us here the gloomy weather has definitely fit the feeling we all have been having 💔 But we are all carrying on & hopeful we will find another to be her pasture pal!

09/02/2024

Just like that, he was gone…

Our hearts here are broken as we say our goodbyes to Cherokee. Though his time with us was short, we enjoyed every minute! We want to thank the Stanford family for entrusting us with him & allowing us to be apart of his very colorful life!

Cherokee in his youth was a traveling fair pony till he found himself at a ranch in Decatur, when he was then gifted to families with small children, one of which was the Stanfords, that truly gave him a sense of love & purpose.

Unfortunately, like many (humans & animals alike) didn’t take too kindly to retirement, but in those short couple months, he became great friends with not only our Karen but Mister Bones, who both stood by his side til the very end. Truly, what an incredible life of 28 years full of adventure, love, & joy to all the lives he had touched!

Join us as we send our prayers, love, & deepest sympathies to the Stanford family.

With that, here’s to you, Cherokee, & happy trails till we meet again…

08/28/2024

Happy Rainbow Bridge Remembrance Memorial Day 🌈

This day is always met with mix emotions of bitter & sweet as we remember all our past loved ones. This year has definitely been a hard one as we lost quite a few since last Remembrance Day.

Starting at the top from left to right we have Miss Oreo who was only 2 months shy of her 17th birthday passing in September with her farmily her daughter Nutella, sons Ash & Shepherd, grandcalf Hershey, & of course all of her humans by her side. Next up we have Rascal who came from our Mimi La Rue when we use to raise Maltese. He found an incredible home with dear family friends that loved him till the very end. He passed unexpectedly this past April at 13. Then Mister Billy Joe… Billy was gifted to our sanctuary by a family friend in 2021 at 6 months till he unfortunately developed hardware disease passing last Thanksgiving. He leaves behind his farmily members Nutella, Ash, Annabelle, Tike, Clarabelle, & all his humans, daughters Hershey & Vanilla along with sons James, Shepherd, Jagger, & Tooter Rookie. Next up we have Exsten who was Rascal’s younger brother that passed in March at the age of 12 years old. Following him we have Sasha who we never got to introduce as she declined quickly before we had the opportunity. Sasha was 17 years old & came to us by more family friends who loved her to the ends of this earth. In the short amount of time she captivated our hearts as well with her sassiness. Beyond blessed to have had what time we had till she went home with the good lord. Oh, Lux… Lux was one of Exsten’s litter mates & again younger brother to Rascal. He passed same day at Rascal & as much as I wish they could’ve stayed with us forever it’s comforting to know they all went together over that rainbow bridge being greeted by their mother & brothers. Lastly we have Aramis… Aramis came into this world sleeping in April resulting in no photos… Son to our sweet little Bisou & middle brother to Casper & Zephyr.

To have been apart of their lives has been the utmost blessing! Here’s to all those who have loved & lost today we shall not forget.

08/27/2024

Effective Immediately, Commissioner's Court signed a 90 day Burn Ban Order for all of Parker County on August 26, 2024. This ban will remain in effect until November 24, 2024, unless lifted by the Commissioner's Court.

During the Burn Ban, if NOAA/National Weather Service issues a Red Flag Warning Day, no burning of household trash will be allowed and no outdoor welding, cutting or grinding will be allowed.

The order in its entirely will be made available at www.parkercountytx.com.