Creating space for listening and learning

For those of you who joined us in our Giving Tuesday fundraiser, we greatly appreciate your generosity. By donating you have become a part of Mandy’s team in ensuring her care and helping us see this vision come to life where we can prioritize the welfare of people, horses, and land simultaneously through education, advocacy, and practice.

To give you an update on Mandy, here at SGS, we are witnessing her personality unfold into the bright, intelligent, and energized mare that she is. She’s got some fire energy to say the least, and we love every bit of it. She’s not afraid to vocalize her wants and needs, knows her boundaries and holds them with both a gentleness and firmness. We admire her and are learning so much from her in this process.

We'd like to share a specific example of how we are navigating the process of managing the emerging dynamics at the farm where we are boarding Mandy.

Photo Credit: Latha, SGS Community Member

Mandy is coming out of her shell as she settles in her new space and is starting to let us know that we have work to do to better meet her needs. We follow the 2020 Five Domains Model of Animal Welfare and selected our current boarding farm due to them meeting the majority of these domains, while also sharing in our values for prioritizing relationship building while caring for horses. We are currently focusing on improving Mandy’s Behavioral Interactions (domain 4), which is related to her social behaviors and relationships with other horses, and how this impacts her Mental State (domain 5).

When a horse enters a new place, there is a period of adjustment as they integrate into the ecosystem.

Mandy adjusted well once she arrived and was able to move in with one of the resident horses at this property. After a few weeks during one of the feeding times, Mandy began kicking one of her pals that she was living with. This was quickly intervened by the farm owner and no one was injured, but it set in motion a number of new considerations for us. Since that incident Mandy is now in a paddock by herself again. She shares fence lines with her friends but their interactions are limited. We are working to understand what might have been happening for Mandy in these moments so we can reintegrate her with a herd as soon as possible.

There is a good chance that Mandy was resource-guarding, which is a behavior seen when a horse (or other animals) feel the need to protect their food. This is a survival response and can often be an indicator of a health issue, like stomach ulcers. 

We have to remember we are not the experts in Mandy’s welfare, Mandy is.

Our role as her human partners, or stewards, is to listen to her and seek out help from others when we need it. 

We have to grapple with our need to control the situation, which often for people, can be related to our own individual traumas and/or socialization to a fast pace.

We are noting that while we want to make changes right away, listening to her and seeking guidance makes for a slow and intentional process.

This is a part of our learning journey.

When we formed Stable Grounds Sanctuary, one of our main goals was to share the vulnerability of our learning processes with you all. We feel there is this façade of perfectionism within the horse industry and our society at large. Everyone “knows everything,” has the perfect space, the perfect herd of horses, and has endless amounts of resources to spare. We know this is simply not true and want to set the precedent with you all that we are a work in progress. We want to normalize the common struggles and imperfections that come with caring for horses in hopes that it resonates with others. We hope that this contributes to a cultural shift in our community in how we view each other within the human-horse-environment interactions.

As we focus on Mandy's welfare needs we continue to dream about a permanent home for the Sanctuary to create a healing ecosystem. We are concurrently excited to dive into building our online educational platform where we will go more in depth about topics like we discussed with you here today. Your support in the form of donations will help grow our capacity to reach this goal. 

We continue to learn humbly with you all and look forward to this continued journey.

All Our Love,
Nicole and the SGS Team