Windy’s Landing horse rescue, a sanctuary for the “least chosen”

By Bronwyn Jones

Sun contributor

When I walk up the grassy drive toward the barn at Windy’s Landing, it’s the miniature horses Doc, Roxy, and Toby that catch my attention first. They graze contentedly in their small pasture but also startle a bit if you approach them on their blind side. They are three of five 1-eyed miniatures all sent to auction by their previous owners due to deformities and blinding infections or cancer in one of their eyes. They’ve been recently rescued from a Michigan kill pen by Nancy Parshall, founder of Windy’s Landing, a newly incorporated 501(c)(3) horse rescue and animal sanctuary in Lake Leelanau.

“After I bailed each one out from the kill pen, I took them directly to a highly recommended Grand Rapids veterinarian, Dr. Bunn, to have their painfully infected eyes treated or removed,” Nancy explained. “It was clear they felt so much better after the surgery. All of them were malnourished as well.”

We watch Doc, the tiniest of the group, mischievously maneuver his head under fencing so he can reach the greener grass beckoning from the other side. Nancy tells me his tiny size categorizes him as a dwarf horse. He’s become the mascot. Black and white, and no bigger than a golden retriever, he is friendly, calm, inquisitive, perfect for visiting elders in nursing care facilities, she thinks.

Doc, Roxy and Toby all have beautifully rounded bellies now. As I lift my gaze from their enclosure to take in the bucolic surroundings, I see all the larger horses in their pastures and feel a sense of deep peace in the presence of these rescued, physically and emotionally rehabilitated beings, each with their own dramatic, often harrowing backstory, their individual personality and presence.

Undergirding that peace, however, is a tremendous amount of work, determination, expertise, and devoted care on the part of Nancy, her husband, Dave Bedford, and the expert equine veterinarian, Dr. Tanja Wittrock, who donates her time to Windy’s Landing. It’s not for the faint of heart bringing special needs horses back to health from the lip of the void.

When I ask Nancy about the origins of her drive to rescue animals, she responds, “If you haven’t experienced being the little kid chosen last for the baseball team, you might not understand how deep the impulse can be to rescue these least chosen horses. When I was a little kid, my mom used to tell me not to feed the neighborhood strays because then they’d stay. Well, of course I fed them so they would stay. Then came my love of horses. And much more recently, I’ve learned too much about what happens to all the neglected horses out there. Once in the kill pen, their time running out, they are the last of the least chosen.”

If you’re not familiar, kill pens are holding areas for horses that fail to find a new owner through a horse dealer or subsequent auction, and instead are bought by livestock traders to be sold as meat. The U.S. stopped slaughtering horses in 2007, so the kill pens are the last stop before a hellacious truck ride (no stalls) to either Mexico or Canada for slaughter.

In a last attempt to find a home for these horses, video posted on social media by kill pen staff gives prospective rescuers a limited time opportunity to connect and “bail out” a horse. (“Bail” is more than the per pound price the horse would fetch as meat.)

“The owners are sometimes unaware,” Nancy explains. “They can’t keep the horse for one reason or another—maybe they’ve had a drop in income—horses are expensive to keep, and so they send the horse off with the intention of finding a new home. But if the dealer can’t sell the horse for whatever reason, the horse goes to auction. If a private buyer doesn’t get them, then the meat buyers do.”

Lottie was her first bail out. Her husband, Dave, had grown up caring for horses and livestock on a farm and had always wanted a draft horse.

Nancy told me the story: “Lottie is part Percheron. She came from a stable that gave rides to the public. But she had developed an open, oozing spot at the top of her neck. We thought there was a foreign object in there, and so took her to Grand Rapids for surgery. But there was no foreign object. Instead, the problem was with a damaged bursa that produced a fluid-filled lump, D-cup size, on each side of the neck brought on by overwork and strain. It could be cleaned out, but it would come back and it did. So, Tanja suggested and prescribed four straight rounds of antibiotics. After that treatment, it didn’t come back.”

Nancy happened to see Windy, the namesake of Windy’s Landing, when she was at the kill pen to pick up a different horse. “He was a registered quarter horse going downhill fast; he was skeletal, his eyes sunken and his nostrils were hugely dilated from heaves, a condition where the struggle to breathe leads to a shudder with each effort to draw breath. I turned to Dave and said that we couldn’t leave without him.”

On the drive home, Nancy called Tanja, and on arrival Tanja did an urgent assessment. His body score (a scale from 0-10) was zero—he had no muscle, just skin and bones. His terrible case of heaves derived from allergies to things like hay dust.

Tanja was pretty sure he wouldn’t make it, but she gave him an injection of steroids. Three hours later he showed no benefit. She injected him again. That time, there was a response. He had to be kept under an open shelter in the pasture to avoid triggers from hay dust and fed special soaked hay pellets.

It required months of vigilance and care, but bit by bit his episodes of heaves were further apart. Now, a year later, (“knock on wood,” Tanja says) he has gained over 250 pounds and has not had a reoccurrence. His dark coat gleams, and when Nancy and I walk into his pasture, he moves close to her and nuzzles her side.

There is a longer backstory, of course, to the evolution of what would become Windy’s Landing. Lottie, Windy, the miniature horses and other recent rescues had precursors. The experience and skill necessary to run a successful horse rescue as a dedicated forever home for animals with complex special needs grows and deepens slowly over time.

Back in Leelanau County after 16 years living abroad, the last nine teaching English in Japan, recently married and dreading the long, northern Michigan winter of 2002-2003, Nancy happened upon an organization that had posted thumbnail photos of Premarin foals. These foals were the offspring of mares that were kept in continuous pregnancy to extract estrogen from their urine. The resulting Premarin was then sold as an estrogen replacement drug for women. While this process has a bad rap now, back then it resulted in tens of thousands of horses considered “surplus” and frequently sold at auction, or sent to slaughter. Nancy wanted to adopt at least one of these foals.

Dave was all in and they wound up committing to four. The foals were born in the spring of 2003 and would be ready for transport that following September. During that time they built the huge, beautiful barn on their acreage outside of Lake Leelanau. They paid for the transport from Canada, and when the foals arrived, they were completely unhandled (except for the halters on them), wild as mustangs and full of all the worms their bodies could hold.

Nancy and Dave sat for hours in the newly fenced small pastures with hay piled on their laps, keeping one hand holding a lead rope and clip under the hay. While a colt was eating, they gently clipped the lead rope to the halter. Each day, they would periodically grab a rope and try to walk a bit closer to a colt, working to build trust and ease. It took weeks, and for one, months, before Nancy or Dave could walk close enough to unclip the lead and actually touch them.

In the spring of 2004, they were ready to be released for the first time into a very large pasture. By then, Nancy was a full-time faculty member in the English department at Northwestern Michigan College (NMC) and a colleague of mine. She invited 40 people to the farm, a mixture of family, friends and colleagues, to watch the “running of the yearlings” as they entered their new pasture for the very first time.

When she opened the gate, they moved tentatively at first into the wide-open space. Nancy had tied bits of cloth to the new fence so they would see it. Suddenly, one started to run, and in a flash they all burst into a run. We all gasped and could feel the earth thundering at our feet with the force of their collective full-tilt gallop. Then they would wheel around and stop for a moment to rest before they took off again. It was a joy to witness the grace and power of their movement as they claimed the new pasture.

Before the colts arrived, Nancy had contacted Tanja as the only experienced equine veterinarian in the county with a full-time practice. When they first spoke, Nancy said she was planning to adopt out two of the colts, but Tanja could tell she really wanted to keep all four. The second time they met it was to spend a day castrating the colts, Nancy and Dave working under Tanja’s guidance. And they have worked together ever since.

Most recently, Tanja stepped back from her full-time practice to become a full-time faculty member in the Science Department at NMC and donate all her equine veterinary expertise and experience to the rescued horses and animals at Windy’s Landing.

The current census is nine horses, six miniature horses, five large dogs, six cats, 18 chickens, and a number of new chicks. And that’s close to full capacity for now.

Key to a successful horse rescue and animal sanctuary is striking the right balance between the drive to rescue as many as possible, and making sure that each rescued animal has everything he or she needs to flourish over time. In the face of the overwhelming number of horses neglected and frequently abandoned to a dreadful fate out in the world, that balance can require a thoughtful restraint.

The intent behind incorporating as a nonprofit is to expand fundraising capacity, allowing for the leasing of land and thereby enabling the rescue of more horses. Medical treatment, medicines, special foods are all costly. Tanja emphasizes that Nancy and Dave’s diligence when taking on horses in the direst conditions and giving them all the love, care, resources and knowledge they need to heal and thrive has been inspiring to her. The three of them are the working heart of the sanctuary, and they have developed a powerful horse healing synergy that gives them all a keen sense of satisfaction.

NMC Visual Communications students developed the Windy’s Landing logo and NMC Business Technology students built the website, all as part of their coursework, which involves the practice of experiential learning across the curriculum. In a beautiful loop of reciprocity, the inspired work of teaching college students has also helped to create an animal rescue that in turn invites the sustained contribution and support of an entire community.

If you’re an experienced horse person, you’ll find an opportunity to volunteer your time. If you’re simply interested in learning more, you’ll find an opportunity to help sustain the lives of these remarkable horses, and in so doing enliven your own heart energy.

To learn more about Windy’s Landing, visit WindysLanding.org.