Animal shelter near Colorado Springs provides shelter for abandoned, abused livestock | Lifestyle

It was after midnight on a cold, dark December morning when Carrie Thornburgh had her hand inside a pregnant goat.

The doe was giving birth at Thornburgh’s animal shelter in Peyton, but her child was stuck: only one leg had made it into the world and all Thornburgh could feel was the top of the child’s shoulder. And the birth took too long, about two hours, while goats usually give birth within 30 minutes. It was a problem.

After calling the vets, Thornburgh eventually found one in Larkspur who agreed to come to OutPaws’ Sweet Home Sanctuary at 2 a.m. She twisted a shoelace around the child inside her mother and pulled her out.

“She had been there so long we thought she might be dead, but she came out breathing,” Thornburgh said. “It was a snowy night and she (the vet) said go home and quickly get a hair dryer to get her dry and warm. We did that and she is a cuddler. She is very connected. And mom is doing well, she is small.”

Delivering a goat was a first for Thornburgh, who only knew about breeding horses and pot-bellied pigs.

“You don’t realize these guys are small, so male vets can’t put their hands in them,” she said. “It does not fit.”

It’s just one of many anecdotes that come from founding and running an animal shelter. Thornburgh, a longtime plaintiff, personal injury and workers’ compensation attorney with her practice, entered the animal rescue niche in 2014 with a foster-based dog and cat rescue in Denver.

In late 2020, she was going to move to New Mexico to build another rescue facility until everything fell through. Coincidentally, one of her former volunteers offered her the Peyton estate, which turned out to be an ideal location. Three years ago, she settled on the 80 acres and shifted her nonprofit’s focus to farm animals. Private tours are available.

“We teach people about the needs of farm animals on the farm and that they need just as much love and compassion as dogs and cats,” Thornburgh said.

There are currently 118 goats, pigs, dairy cows, sheep, ducks and turkeys living in the sanctuary. Most of them, of course, stay outside, with the exception of Green Bean, the chicken turkey, who must live separately from the other two chicken turkeys, which are also separated, as the large birds are known provocateurs who thrive by bloodying each other.

Squirt, a sweet black and white pig, also loves to lounge indoors at night until he goes to sleep in his indoor cage. The 18-month-old boy arrived a year ago after a developmentally disabled young adult took him from someone who gave him away in a Walmart parking lot in Wyoming. Her parents didn’t agree with the random adoption and found Thornburgh, who adores the 50-pound snorter: “He loves to curl up on the couch and cuddle.”

Also at Squirt there are seven dogs, including one who uses a custom-made cart because her back two legs were seriously injured by previous owners, four cats and four bunnies, who will move to the outdoor rabbit shed once a fence is completed.

Most of these animals will spend their lives at the rescue, although a number of goats are available for adoption after a hoarding situation in October deposited 58 female Nigerian dwarfs at the shelter. Sixteen of them were pregnant and went into labor in November, which is how Thornburgh ended up with her hand in a goat.

“For three weeks I was up every three hours delivering babies,” she said.

As Thornburgh walks through her estate on a cloudy day in March, her merry flock of foxes, each named after a flower from A to Z, such as Begonia and Violet, chase each other in circles around a shed in the coop, their hind legs upright. in preparation for a good headbutt, and bleat and bay their talkative little goat hearts. A second herd of deer and their children live in another pen next to the sheep. While many are ready for a new home, some will stay simply because they captured Thornburgh’s heart.

“Carrie is the heart of the operation,” said farm volunteer Nick Palensky. “The enormous amount of time, energy and effort she devotes to these animals day in and day out, in all weathers and situations, is absolute and thorough.”

Outside a barn lives a flock of ducks, divided into males and females, except for big boy Raisin, who is allowed to live with the ladies because the other boys were bothering him. The two sexes are separated because boy ducks are called Lotharios – and Thornburgh doesn’t want them to overhear her girl ducks amore.

“People get ducks from the feed store when they’re young and cute and then dump them at the local ponds and think they can live, but they can’t,” she said.

‘They are domesticated. We raise them for meat and they are bred to be too heavy in the front so they can’t fly like a mallard.”

Three guys who aren’t going anywhere anytime soon are Tim, Milkshake and Chance, all dairy cow waste.

“People don’t realize this, but to get milk, cows have to stay pregnant, so male calves are just wasted animals. It’s just trash,” Thornburgh said. “They are taken from their mothers, usually before they have colostrum, and thrown into the waste pen and sold for a few hundred dollars or sent to calf farms or slaughtered.”

Completing the menagerie is Huck Finn, a giant white pig who hates poor little Squirt, so the two are kept separate. Thornburgh suspects that Huck may be jealous because he was the only pig. He jumped from a meat truck in Nebraska when he was 3 weeks old and arrived at the shelter in a cat carrier.

The big man happily shares his living space with Fezzik, named after the giant from the movie ‘The Princess Bride’, who was dumped in the middle of the night in the driveway of a wildlife rehabilitation center in Divide. There is another pig on the premises: Vincent van Gogh, named after the artist who lost his ear. Vinnie also lost an ear for what a vet suspected was deliberate torture of his former owner.

‘First he lunged at us and bit. You could tell he was scared,” said Thornburgh, who went to catch him after people found him in the Black Forest on a dark, snowy night in December.

“He and Squirt will be buddies once he is neutered. He is learning slowly but surely, no one will hurt him.”

There is currently no room at the inn, thanks to the influx of goats, but the shelter will accept more animals once they are adopted. Thornburgh will record what she can depending on what space is available when people reach out. She would consider more cows, but definitely pigs, sheep, female ducks and a turkey. And she’s always grateful for more volunteers, who help her unload hay, build fences, restore electricity when storms pass through and capture stray animals in need of homes.

Palensky has been volunteering at the farm once or twice a week since October, helping maintain the animals’ enclosures and making sure they are well cared for. And it doesn’t hurt that he gets to cuddle baby goats and pet his favorite resident, the big brown cow Tim.

“The concept of treating all of these animals with the same dignity, respect and care that we give dogs and cats as pets is important,” the Colorado Springs resident said. “I see the same love, affection and intellect in the animals that we have here. I wasn’t fully aware of that until I had the opportunity to interact with them.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, all the stories of animal abuse Thornburgh has heard in recent years, as well as her bond with her critters, have created a paradigm shift for the animal lover. Around the same time she opened the shelter, the former meat eater became vegan.

“If you know where your food comes from, it’s not a problem,” she said.

What put her over the top?

“Probably the dairy cows and seeing what the babies go through,” she said. “Pigs kill me too when you see videos of slaughterhouses. Pigs are extremely intelligent and very emotional, and that is devastating. They are not even a year old when they are killed.”

Contact the writer: 636-0270