Our Quinta, who is about 40 years old, is as if she were 120 human.
years old!
With care, dedication and love, everything is possible :)
Author: Paola Bertin
2020 calendar
Ez’s place calendar is ready!
In perfect Retro Style 😍😍😍
Each calendar will help our shelter, for information and for buying it,
we are at your disposal.💖💖💖
Muuuhpedia
A bovine can eat up to 50 kilos of food per day. In the summer this mainly consists of fresh grass but often hay is also added.
Cows are ruminants and as such have a stomach with 4 chambers or “pouches”. When they graze or eat hay they swallow almost without chewing and the food accumulates in the rumen, the first stomach, where with the aid of bacteria it is partly digested. This process requires that a cow drink up to 100 liters of water per day.
At this point the process gets somewhat gross and anyone eating a tasty snack right now may want to skip this passage. While restiing, the cow now regurgitates the food and water mix into its mouth (much like a person after his 11th grappa) where it gets re-chewed, re-swallowed and deposited in the reticulum. During the various stages of mastication a cow can produce up to 200 liters of saliva a day. This process of swallowing, un-swallowing, re-chewing and re-swallowing is called rumination or more commonly “chewing the cud”.
There is little separation between the first two sections of a cow’s stomach, the reticulum and the rumen, so food and water can pass back and forth easily. The reticulum is made of muscle and by contracting it forces food into the cow’s esophagus which carries the food back to the mouth.
The next pouch in the stomach is the omasum. This pouch acts like a giant filter to keep plant particles inside the rumen while allowing water to pass freely.
After the grass pieces and other feed are broken down to a small enough size they eventually pass on to their final destination, the abomasum or “true stomach” which produces acids, buffers and enzymes to break down the food. After passing through the abomasum the partially digested food enters the small intestine where digestion continues and nutrients are absorbed and then on to the large intestine where waste in formed and then eliminated.
New entry at our shelter!
Sandy, born 2008, a pony of approx. 12 hands. Sandy has worked at a riding stable as a good little jumper until she started loosing her eye sight. Now her left eye is completely blind and with her right eye she can see only shadows. To not let her end up at the butchers the Shelter took her in.
The Shelter urgently need funds for an animal which, give our financial situation, we are hard pressed to support. We are seeking someone for a distance adoption who would like to contribute to Sandy’s upkeep. Please consider giving her a hand.
IBAN : IT43M0880564890008008900302
Heartfelt Thanks,
An update of few days ago: Sandy’s blindness is almost total and irreversible 🙁
Whiskey and Claudia! A Horse, His Owner and the Stroke.
Hello, my name is Claudia and I’d like to tell you about my experience with Whiskey who would have been thirty years old this December.
In 2005 I decided to adopt Whiskey, a horse who had been bred to be a jumper but as we know if one is not perfect one is often sidelined and that is what happened to Whiskey.
I had just started volunteering at EZ’s Place, a horse shelter, where I aquired a wealth of theoretical and practical information about the equine world. Whiskey already had an owner, if you could call her that, but for me and Whiskey it was love at first sight, you could say we chose each other. Knowing full well what it would entail I decided, with the help of my mother, to adopt Whiskey because as everyone should know, maintaining a horse is not like maintaing a hamster. I’m also frequently posed questions like “you need to trim a horses hooves?” “why do they have blankets on?” to which I reply “don’t you trim your nails?” “but if you’re cold don’t you cover up?”.
But lets talk about us…over the past three months my horse and I had two life changing experiences which I would like to tell you about. In June a tornado alit at the shelter which destroyed Whiskey’s house and caused a lot of other damage. Luckily no one was injured, truely a miracle. It was an important lesson for both of us, damage can be repaired but life once lost can’t be restored.
My second experience was at the beginning of August when I received a call from Evelyn to tell me that the horse wasn’t well—I ran—and quickly arrived at the shelter to see what was happening. Whiskey was in a bad way. At first, given his symptoms, we suspected heat stroke and decided to intervene with cold showers and cortisone until the first available vet could arrive. As soon as it was confirmed that it could have been heat stroke the vet prepared an IV saline solution to hydrate him, listened to his heart and examined him. In a few hours he seem stabilized.
Little by little we saw a slight improvement, nonetheless, we called our regular vet who came out the following day. With fresh eyes we noticed that Whiskey’s face seemed asymetrical, he acted confused and had difficulty
chewing and swallowing. He no longer swished his tail and didn’t urinate. The only thing he could do was defecate. Then came the awful diagnosis—STROKE!
The blood froze in my veins; I was incredulous. A stroke in a horse is not an everyday occurance. I had no idea what would happen.
With the help of the vet and Evelyn’s wealth of experience we decided to intervene immediately doing all we could with IVs and pharmaceuticals. Whiskey was wonderful about it all and we stayed with him day and night. However, after three days went by without him urinating we realized that the neurological lesion was still active.
All sorts of thoughts were going through my mind but I knew he couldn’t survive in the condition he was in. We sat around the table and I had to come to a decision: put an end to his suffering, my pain was overwhelming and my heart would not let me make that decision. I don’t know if Whiskey had heard us but within an hour or so he started urinating on his own, my eyes lit up with joy!!! I never thought I’d be in seventh heaven over a pee.
The days went by and he regained almost all his motor functions but he still was unable to retract his penis, a very delicate organ. We decided to call the vet for the umpteenth consultation. The area was damaged and we tried to intervene with massages and all else possible but in the end there wasn’t much more we could do.
Time to get creative! We fashioned a sort of sling to support his penis in order to prevent it from swelling. Project “Underwear” morphed several times to adapt to Whiskey’s needs.
The vet proposed a possible surgical solution, penile amputation, but that would have entailed post operative pain, a stay in a clinic where he would have been alone and the stress of a long trip to the clinic. Also, the success rate was only 20%.
It was time to make a decision!! Making a decision for another sentient being is difficult, it weighs on your soul because you don’t know if you’ve made the right choice. Well I decided that I wanted to leave him in peace. I didn’t feel it was right to subject him to additional pain and suffering to perhaps buy him four months.
Three months went by and he was fine. Whiskey was a strong horse in body and spirit!
It was an emotional experience…I want to thank all of you who wrote me or asked about him and a special thanks to Evelyn and the staff at EZ’s Place, Montereale Valcellina.
Whiskey is no longer with us. A colic took him a month ago, he passed away serenly surrounded by his dear friends at the shelter.