Lockdown at Tenerife Horse Rescue

At this time I believe it is impossible for anyone to be reading this, anywhere in the world who has not been affected by the Corona outbreak. Weather or not your country has just started lock-down or whether you have been in it already for some time. This is a difficult time for everyone, the virus alone is enough to cause concern but the effect it has had on the world has also caused hard times for everyone.

Here at the Finca we are very fortunate in many ways, we and our families are all safe and healthy, we are in lock-down in good company as some of our kind volunteers chose to stay with us during this difficult time, we have plenty of work to do to distract from the boredom, outside space, good weather and animals that need us. We have spent our time extending the goat paddock, finishing the roof in the yurt kitchen, building water filters, cleaning poo, painting, building a pallet plant wall, cleaning more poo, building a muck heap, cementing, cleaning even more poo and watching the sun go down together as we share communal meals in the simple life, for this we are very grateful and wake up each day with a positive attitude and take a deep breath and enjoy the views.

Sadly its not all easy and peaceful here, however we try to concentrate on the good and be grateful. But some things have really effected us more than we could have imagined. Because we are new and still building the finca we have huge outgoings on workers, feed, vet bills, building supplies, architect and license fees, we have no income other than donations, we are very lucky to have some very generous supporters, but due to being so new we don’t yet have a big following. We are fortunate to have some horses feeds covered by people sharing them, this has stopped due to people not being able to visit, this has also resulted in people not turning up with bags of cat or dog foods ( luckily this happens quite regularly) We rely a lot on food donations that we have found connections with over the year, left over from restaurants, bakeries, green grocers and supermarkets. This feeds not only our animals but us and our volunteers too. All of this have stopped except 1 small supermarket, however they have sold out of most items due to panic buying. This has all meant that our food bills for animals and humans has become huge. Luckily our volunteers are very understanding and have become part of the family so we are all getting quite good at cooking eggs ( thanks to the rescue chickens and ducks) or pasta. The animals cant be quite so adaptable, our regular suppliers are from the mainland or further afield, but due to a drop in boats main suppliers are not supplying to small businesses like us, or if they are they have a huge wait. This is a further problem as not only do we need to buy more food, we have to buy it all full price or in bulk.
We managed to raise some money to buy a few extra bales of hay in preparation of a shortage on the island, but we still need to buy more.
Feed is not our only problem just this biggest one. There are other little problems to such as the poor horses are starting to get very bored, we are not permitted to ride them, even inside our own land only lunge or in hand walk on our private land, our land is not big so that would take all of 3 minutes per horse and many of our horses are incapable to lunge due to injuries or health problems, those who can don’t generally tend to enjoy it, i think the poor horses are suffering more than we are. If you have been following us for sometime you will know that we finally got the planning permission a while back for the official horse stables, we got it built and signed off by the architect. The architect had an appointment with the town hall on the monday that the lockdown started, this has put our sign off much further down the line. We are still waiting for this 1 very very important stamp to finalise all of our project, to sign off the license on the land and we can all sigh a huge sigh of relief that it hasn’t been declined. Until this moment we still have this very big fear hanging over our heads that we could loose it all. So the lockdown just took this date futher away, but we will carry on building and working with faith and a high spirit that we are glad to say our amazing volunteers and team have almost everyday! Thank you all, especially the current Finca family ! Next week i will update with another blog on the mini adventures we have had on the finca such as a mummy duck accidentally hatching chicken babies and our 9 cats who have moved from the house to the finca with us!

If anyone feels they can help us in anyway that would be amazing, even if you want to share this blog its a huge huge help to get us out there.

Donation options are
via paypal; horseholidaysinfo@gmail.com
direct bank transfer ES3600810608380001737577 or
via our website on “how to help page”
or on our specific lockdown fundraiser below

Thank you all for reading, please keep safe and sane during this hard time. Good luck…. see you all the other side.