A Life Full of Emotion
Day-to-day life at the finca has its big ups and downs — it’s full of emotion, happiness, sadness and laughter. This week’s episode shows it clearly, with lows when we have sudden sad news about a finca family member, followed by great highs laughing at Edo when he demonstrates his unique way of fixing a water tank early in the morning.
We have recently started to document our story on YouTube as an exciting series. We are real, honest, unedited, and unrehearsed. You can see us as we truly are — living our day-to-day lives at the finca.
Mission: Clean Up and Get Organised
This episode starts with a mission clean-up. It’s incredible how quickly the place can get messy — chicken poo, rubbish, hay, and broken wood filling up our top feeding station. The boys build a brand-new feeding station while we girls clean it all out with the horses’ help. We sped it up to make it visually fun — it looks like a game of The Sims! With a great team, even the boring jobs become fun.
Saying Goodbye Is Part of Our Life
This is a sad but true fact. The hardest part of running an animal sanctuary is saying goodbye. It’s inevitable — most of our animals come to us toward the end of their time on Earth. We are happy to be a part of the last happy part of their lives, but it never gets easier. Death is, and always will be, a big part of rescue life.
About Cupcake the Hamster
For anyone who has stayed at the finca or visited our “office” in the past year, you probably knew Cupcake the hamster. He may have been “just a hamster,” as many said, but he gave our office life — stealing paperwork and hiding it in his bed!
Originally, Cupcake came to live in our office/bedroom because he had a massive abscess caused by fighting another hamster. Half of his body was infected and sore — we didn’t think he’d make it. But with daily treatments, he recovered and became Emma’s personal office companion. He never returned to the big outdoor enclosure and remained the beloved “office hamster.”
He’d run to people begging for food, steal it, stash it, and return for more. Confident and happy as could be, he passed away peacefully at the age of about five. He’d been with his previous owners for 2½ years before joining us and living over a year at the finca.
In this week’s episode, you’ll see funny clips of him stealing paperwork, stuffing his cheeks with carrots, and — sadly — his final goodbye.
Leaving With a Laugh!
The final part of episode 3 leaves you smiling. In true finca fashion, we find creative ways to fix problems. When the water tank broke, Edo had to dive into freezing, stinky water to fix it — early in the morning, in his underwear! Watch him question his life choices while laughing through the chaos.
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We’ll continue filming and documenting the making of Tenerife Animal Sanctuary and our day-to-day finca life — and we invite you to be part of it. Watch where your kind donations go, see the laughter, the tears, and the real life behind the rescue.
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“We are real, honest, unedited, and unrehearsed. You can see us as we are and how our day-to-day lives at the finca go.”
