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The call came in on December 4th. “There is an animal sanctuary with over 1200
animals that will be out of food in three days. Can you help?” “Of course,” I replied. Three
days later we delivered thirty tons of hay and paid for thirty more. At first glance you
couldn’t tell the level of neglect the animals were experiencing. The donkeys however, were
another story. They stood huddled together in their small corral, standing on feet that made
your jaw drop, heads down, & miserable. I have never seen animals so dejected. You could
tell they had lost all hope. It was heartbreaking.
 We unloaded the truck and left. I thought to myself,
“This will buy some time for the rescuers to get up here and get these animals out.” Two weeks
later the only animals removed from the sanctuary grounds were the South American cavies and
the donkeys. Once again the animals were running out of food. It weighed heavy on my mind
during the day. I couldn’t sleep at night. I told myself “I am an animal food bank. I am not
in the business of rescuing sanctuaries”. But the rescuers were not rescuing. Reports of guns
on the property and veiled threats were filtering through the animal welfare world. None of
the rescuers were willing to put themselves in harm’s way and possibly lose their lives if
something went south while the “caretakers” were still living there. I didn’t believe it was
in my cards to be shot anytime in the near future. So I talked it over with my husband and we
decided we had to go.
I gathered my team and we drove to Niarada on December 21st, planning on staying for seven days. Four days into our stay, the
freezing fog we had been experiencing, broke…revealing an incredibly disturbing scene.
Animals were dying every day, there was no shelter and Mother Nature was unleashing her wrath
on over 1000 sick and extremely malnourished creatures. After seeing the situation for
what it was, we realized we couldn’t leave. We were now in the business of rescuing
sanctuaries.
The first thing we did was to get the llamas rounded up out of the hills and
into make shift shelter. It took us four days to bring them in. Ninety percent of the herd
was gelded but the other ten percent were wreaking havoc with the females. We realized every
female on the sanctuary grounds was probably pregnant. The males were literally killing
the females by riding them so hard.
We took immediate action and separated them.
In the following three weeks, we mended fences, fixed broken machinery with
grossly inadequate tools, hung tarps to break the biting winds, set up nurseries for new
mothers and babies, bottle fed newborns every four hours through the night whose mothers were too starved to produce milk, rubbed life back into
frozen little bodies found out on the snow covered ground, removed the dead from the fields
every day for weeks on end, and cried alone at night behind closed doors. We coordinated hay
transports, processed a mountain of paperwork, scheduled fuel deliveries, volunteers and
animal transports.
 We learned about camels, llamas, emus and hay. We learned that the
4 tons of hay a day being fed to over 1000 animals was full of weeds and cheatgrass. No wonder
they were starving to death. When I questioned one of the “caretakers” about this, his answer
was “what they don’t eat they bed down on.”
I wanted to hit him. How nice. They will have a soft bed of weeds to lie down on after they
DIE from starvation. I bought 22 tons of new hay the next day. Good hay. It takes two weeks
for the nutrition to stop the deaths. Those were the longest two weeks of our lives. We
watched Muhone, the biggest of the two camels crawl across his corral on his knees and
listened to him cry in the night. The horses didn’t fare any better. They were hard to look
at. One had a hoof so long and curled up, that it looked like a snail. The little pony with a
broken hip was the one that made me choke up. He walked around in circles. Always circles.
Desperately trying to get to the hay. “Oh no,” I was told, “there’s nothing wrong with him, he
was in a rodeo, he always does that.”
The emotional toll and physical toll was hard on all of us. Our work day
began at 6am and ended at 10:00p.m. We did things that we never could have imagined we
would be doing. We went to Niarada knowing nothing about livestock and got a crash
course in what it’s like to rescue a sanctuary.
It’s a lesson no one should have to learn.
In the end scores of people came together to save the lives of the animals at
The Montana Large Animal Sanctuary & Rescue. We re-homed 764 animals in less than a
month. They went to New York, Colorado, California, Illinois, Texas, Washington and many
points in between.
Special thanks to:
Patty Finch, Executive Director of The Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries.
Without Patty’s leadership and guidance none of this would have been possible. Patty
spearheaded the rescue when no one else would.
Jerry Finch, President of Habitat For Horses. (no relation) His presence alone
was comforting. His knowledge and rock steady determination shored us all up when things
looked particularly dark.
The rescue of the Montana Large Animal Sanctuary
is believed to be the largest rescue of a sanctuary in history. Thank you to everyone that participated, donated, transported, sent good
thoughts our way, and those who opened their hearts & homes to the animals. It took all
of us to accomplish this feat.
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