CETA Foundation / Phoenix Ranch

10/23/2026

An old cart horse at a sanctuary in Argentina stood at the same corner of his paddock every evening and refused his dinner, and nobody understood why until a volunteer read a note that had been sitting in a city file for seven months.

For sixteen years, Ramón collected cardboard in the city of Córdoba.

He is 68 now. Every evening at about seven, when the shops put their empty boxes out on the pavement, he hitched his grey horse, Moro, to a wooden cart with car tyres and went out into the traffic.

They did the same route six nights a week. Moro knew every stop. He knew which baker gave them stale bread and which mechanic shouted at them.

When they got home after midnight, Ramón did the same thing every night. He filled Moro's bucket, turned an old crate upside down, and sat next to him in the yard drinking mate while the horse ate.

"He doesn't like to eat alone," he used to tell his wife, Elsa. She thought he was joking.

Then the city changed the rules.

Like several cities in Argentina, Córdoba began replacing horse carts with small motor carts. The horses were handed over to the municipality to be checked by vets and sent to new homes.

Ramón didn't argue. He knew Moro was 20 and his knees were getting stiff. He signed the papers in November.

He was given a motor cart, and the horse was led into a trailer.

He was never told where it went.

Moro ended up at a horse sanctuary in the hills, about 60 kilometres outside the city. He had good grass, a vet, and a dozen other retired horses for company.

And every evening, at about seven, he walked to the corner of his paddock closest to the road and stood there.

He wouldn't touch his evening feed.

He ate a little hay during the day. But the bucket of soaked pellets the old horses got at dusk stayed full, night after night. By February he had lost so much weight that his ribs showed.

Lucía, a 24 year old veterinary student who volunteers there on weekends, took a photo of him one evening: a thin grey horse standing in the dust at the fence, staring at the road, with a full bucket behind him.

The sanctuary tried everything.

The vet checked his teeth and his stomach and found nothing serious. They changed his feed. They put a calm old mare in with him. They moved him to a different paddock.

He just walked to the new corner closest to the road.

It was Lucía who noticed the one evening that didn't fit.

In April, on a cold night, the sanctuary's caretaker, Don Julio, a man in his seventies, sat down on a bucket near Moro's gate with his thermos and his mate gourd, because he was waiting for a delivery.

That night, Moro walked over and finished his whole bucket.

Lucía couldn't stop thinking about it. The next evening she sat there herself with a thermos.

Moro ate half.

She said later that was when she knew this wasn't about food. It was about somebody.

So she asked the municipality for Moro's file.

It took weeks. When the papers finally arrived, there was the usual form, the vet report, an owner's name and an address on the edge of the city.

And stapled to the back, a small piece of lined paper, written in pencil.

"His name is Moro. He is good in traffic but scared of dogs. He doesn't like to eat alone. Please tell me where he goes. Ramón."

Nobody had ever passed it on.

Lucía drove to the address the next Saturday. Elsa opened the door. Ramón was out in the motor cart.

When he got home and Lucía showed him the photo on her phone, he didn't say anything for a long time. Elsa said he had gone to the city office every month since November to ask about his horse, and every month they told him they couldn't give out that information.

On Sunday 7 June, Ramón took two buses and walked the last kilometre up a dirt road with his grandson, Tomás, who is 15.

He was carrying a plastic bag with a thermos, a mate gourd and half a loaf of yesterday's bread.

At the gate, he didn't call the horse.

He turned a crate upside down, sat on it, and poured hot water over the mate, the way he had done every night for sixteen years.

Moro was on the far side of the paddock.

He lifted his head.

Then he came across the field at a stiff, uneven trot, the fastest anyone at the sanctuary had seen him move, and pushed his whole head into Ramón's chest so hard that the old man's cap fell off.

Ramón didn't pick it up. He held the horse's face in both hands and kept saying the same thing. "Ya está, viejo. Ya está." It's all right, old man. It's all right.

Tomás filmed it on his phone, his hand shaking.

Lucía had to walk back to her car for a minute.

That evening, Moro ate his entire bucket, with Ramón sitting next to him on the crate.

The sanctuary's vet says she isn't surprised. "Horses are creatures of routine, and they form real bonds with people," she said. "For sixteen years, his day ended with that man sitting beside him. We could give him everything else. We couldn't give him that."

Ramón can't take Moro home. The carts are banned and he has no land, and he says Moro has earned his rest.

So every second Sunday, he takes the two buses. Lucía picks him up at the bottom of the road.

Moro has put the weight back on. The staff say that on those Sundays he is standing at the gate long before the bus is due.

Ramón still doesn't call him. He just sits down and pours the mate.

For sixteen years, Ramón sat beside his horse so he would never have to eat alone.

Now, every second Sunday, the horse waits at the gate to return the favour. ❤️

10/23/2026

10/23/2026

Every school morning for six years, an old horse stood at the same gate and watched the same bus go by. On Tuesday the 7th of January, the gate was empty. The driver stopped the bus.

Steve Holroyd is 52. He drives the 7:35 school bus out of a small village in the Yorkshire Dales, down a narrow lane with drystone walls on both sides.

Halfway down the lane there's a field. And in the field, there's Bramble.

She's a 31 year old bay mare with a grey face and a bit of a belly. She belongs to Lorna Ackroyd, a retired nurse who lives in the farmhouse at the top of the lane.

Nobody knows why Bramble likes the bus. But every school day, when she heard it coming, she walked over to the gate and put her head over.

The kids called her "the bus horse." They waved at her. Some of the little ones said good morning to her out loud.

Steve always slowed down a bit so they could.

That Tuesday was the coldest morning of the winter. Minus seven. It was still half dark, and there was snow on the ground.

The gate was empty.

"I noticed straight away," Steve says. "Six years, she'd never missed. Not once. Not even in the rain."

He slowed right down and looked across the field.

From the driver's seat of a bus, you sit high enough to see over the walls. And right at the bottom, by the beck, there was something dark against the snow that didn't look right.

Then one of the older girls at the back, 13-year-old Ellie, stood up.

"She's in the water," she said. "Steve, she's lying in the water."

Steve pulled into a gateway and put the hazard lights on. He couldn't leave a bus full of children. So he called 999 from the cab, then rang the depot and asked them to ring Lorna.

Nobody on the bus said a word. The kids were all pressed against the windows on one side.

A few minutes later, Lorna came running down the field in her dressing gown and wellies.

Bramble was lying on her side in the beck, where the bank had given way. Her back legs were sunk deep in the mud. Only her head and neck were out of the water, resting on the bank.

She'd been there most of the night. She was shaking.

Lorna climbed straight into the water and held Bramble's head in her lap.

Then Steve had to go. Twenty-nine children still needed to get to school.

"That was the worst bit," he says. "Driving off. Every single one of them was turned round, looking out the back window."

The fire crew got there just before eight, with their large animal rescue team. A vet, Hannah Shaw, arrived ten minutes later.

It took them nearly three hours.

They dug the mud away from her legs with shovels and with their hands. They slid long straps under her body. Hannah put warm fluids into her vein while she was still lying in the beck, and they piled rugs on top of her.

Lorna never moved. She stayed in the freezing water with Bramble's head in her arms, talking to her the whole time.

"I just told her about the bus," Lorna says. "I said, the children are waiting for you. I didn't know what else to say."

At ten to eleven, they got her onto a rescue sled, and a farmer from down the lane pulled her up the bank with his tractor.

But she still wasn't safe.

Hannah explained afterwards that when an old horse has been down in cold water for hours, the most dangerous part is what comes next. If they can't get back up on their own, a lot of them don't make it.

For twenty minutes, Bramble lay on the frozen grass under a pile of rugs and didn't even try.

Then she lifted her head.

She tucked her front legs under her. And on the third go, she stood up.

The firefighters clapped. Lorna sat down in the grass and cried.

The reason Bramble was in the beck at all turned out to be very simple.

The water trough in her field had frozen solid in the night. Lorna broke the ice on it last thing at night and again when she fed Bramble at nine, but that night it froze hard after she'd gone to bed. Bramble was thirsty, so she walked down to the beck to drink, the way she'd done every summer for years. The frozen edge cracked under her, and she slid in.

Hannah said it's one of the most common winter call outs for horses. A frozen trough, a thirsty horse, and a muddy bank.

"If that bus hadn't come past, I don't think she'd have made it," Hannah said. "Lorna wouldn't have gone down to the field till nine. That's another hour and a half in that water, and she didn't have it."

At school that day, the teachers let the bus kids check for news at lunchtime. Lorna's daughter had posted one photo: Bramble on her feet, in a muddy rug, with firefighters all around her.

Steve says the noise on the bus home that afternoon was unbelievable.

Lorna bought a heated trough the same week.

Bramble spent five days in the stable. And on Monday morning, at 7:41, Steve came round the bend and slowed down.

She was at the gate. Wrapped in a big purple rug, her head over the top, ears forward.

The whole bus cheered. Somebody at the back started clapping, and then everybody did.

Ellie took a photo through the window. It's steamed up and wonky, and there's somebody's glove in the corner. Lorna had it printed, and it's stuck on her fridge.

At Christmas, the bus kids made Bramble a card. Twenty nine names. Lorna pinned it up in the stable.

Bramble is still at the gate every school morning.

And Steve still slows down.

"I'll be honest," he says. "Some mornings I look for her before I look at the road."

For six years, an old horse waited at a gate for those children every single morning. On the one morning she couldn't be there, they noticed. ❤️

10/23/2026

The keepers warned the family not to expect anything. The old giraffe was shy, she didn't like strangers, and she hadn't seen this woman in six years. But when the ambulance crew wheeled the stretcher into the giraffe house, she walked straight across the sand and lowered her head. Everyone in the room understood why within seconds.

Jonas Krüger is 34. He has been a giraffe keeper at a city zoo in eastern Germany for eight years.

In early September, the zoo office forwarded him an unusual request.

It came from the Wünschewagen, the "wish wagon". It is an ambulance run by volunteer paramedics. They drive people who are dying to one last place they want to see. A beach, a football stadium, a wedding, an old house.

This time, the place was the giraffe house.

The patient was a woman called Renate Vogel. She was 71, she had cancer, and the doctors said she had weeks, not months.

She had worked at the zoo for 34 years. She retired in 2019, before Jonas really got to know her. He remembered her as the quiet woman with the grey plait who always came in an hour early.

The request had one line that worried him.

"She would like to see Mara."

Mara is the oldest giraffe at the zoo. She is 22, which is old for a giraffe.

And she is the hardest one to work with.

She is nervous. She stays at the back of the paddock when visitors crowd the fence. She won't take food from people she doesn't know. When the vet comes, it takes the keepers weeks of patient training just to get her to stand still by the rail.

"Honestly, I was scared it would go badly," Jonas says. "I told the daughter on the phone, please don't be disappointed if Mara stays in the corner. She does that with almost everybody."

The visit was set for Thursday, the 18th of September, before the zoo opened.

At 8 o'clock, the white ambulance backed up to the service gate. Two volunteer paramedics, Thomas and Sabine, rolled the stretcher across the yard. Renate's husband, Klaus, walked beside her. Their daughter Anke followed with a bag, a blanket and her phone.

Renate was very thin. She was wrapped in a red fleece blanket, and she had a little oxygen tube under her nose.

Jonas opened the big door, and they wheeled her inside, onto the sand, as close to the rail as they were allowed.

The other giraffes looked at the visitors and stayed where they were.

Mara was at the far end, eating hay.

For a minute, nothing happened.

Then Renate lifted her head from the pillow and said, very quietly, "Na, meine Große." Well, my big girl.

Mara stopped chewing.

She turned her head. She looked across the house. And then she walked, slowly, all the way over to the rail.

Jonas says he held his breath.

Mara bent her long neck down until her face was level with the stretcher. She sniffed Renate's hair. She sniffed the blanket. Then she rested her soft grey nose against Renate's cheek and stayed like that, not moving.

Renate put her hand up and stroked her face, the way you would stroke a child's.

Klaus started to cry. Thomas, the paramedic, had to turn away and look at the wall.

Jonas had to step outside.

It was only later, in the staff kitchen, that the older keepers told him the part he didn't know.

In May 2003, Mara was born on a cold night. Her mother wouldn't let her drink. She kept walking away from her. A newborn giraffe that doesn't drink in the first hours will die.

The keeper on duty that night was Renate.

She mixed the first bottle at 2 in the morning. Then she fed her every three hours, day and night, for weeks. She slept on straw bales in the giraffe house, in her work jacket, with an alarm clock. She went home only to shower.

Her colleagues still have the photos. A young Renate in a blue jacket, holding a huge bottle up over her head, and a wobbly calf with its legs everywhere.

Mara grew up. She joined the herd. But for the next 16 years, she always came to the rail for one keeper first.

And every morning, Renate greeted her the same way.

"Na, meine Große."

"Giraffes are very good with smell and voices," Jonas says. "A hand reared giraffe never really forgets who raised her. I knew that from the books. I just never saw it like that."

The visit was supposed to last twenty minutes.

It lasted more than an hour.

Mara stayed at the rail almost the whole time. Twice, she wandered off to the hay, and both times she came back. At the end, Renate was too tired to lift her hand anymore, so Anke held her mother's hand up, and Mara sniffed it one last time.

On the way out, Renate told Jonas only one thing.

"She likes her ears scratched on the left side. Not the right."

Renate Vogel died at home on Monday, the 29th of September. Eleven days later. Klaus and Anke were with her.

Anke says her mother talked about the visit every single day. "She said she had been afraid Mara wouldn't remember her. She said, now I can go."

Jonas has kept the red blanket Renate left behind. It hangs by the keepers' door.

And every morning now, when he comes in to feed the herd, he goes to the rail first, scratches the old giraffe behind her left ear, and says, a little awkwardly in his own voice, "Na, meine Große."

He says Mara still comes to him first. ❤️

10/23/2026

The livestock show at the county fair in Beloit, Kansas, runs four days, and by Saturday afternoon most of the steers and hogs have already been judged and sold.

Kenzie is 15 and has shown calves in that ring since she was 9. Last spring she was volunteering at the county shelter for her 4-H service hours and kept walking past the same row of old dogs. A family would come in, stop at the first run, and keep going.

She asked her club leader why the old dogs couldn't be shown at the fair like anything else.

There wasn't a rule against it, so the club tried. In June, 12 kids in the club picked out 16 old shelter dogs between them. For six weeks they treated those dogs the way they treat show animals. Every evening after chores came a walk on a lead, and the old dogs got baths with the cattle shampoo. In the yard the kids practiced until the old dogs would stop and stand square for the judge.

The night before the show they washed the sawdust out of every coat in the wash rack. On the last Saturday of the fair they brought all 16 into the sawdust ring.

Farm families waiting for the hog sale filled the bleachers. The announcer read a card for each dog with a name and one thing the dog liked. A retired cattle judge in a straw hat went down the line the way he'd judge heifers, bent over each dog and asked each kid a question.

Every dog got a blue ribbon. The judge said every one of those old dogs had earned it by standing still that long in the heat.

Then families started coming down out of the bleachers.

By Sunday night, 14 of the 16 had gone home with families from the fair. Two more went the following week.

Doodle, an old basset hound, was the last one picked. The judge had been standing at the ring rail with Doodle's lead in his hand for most of the afternoon. When the club leader came to collect the lead, the judge asked her if Doodle was still available.

06/28/2026

My cousin reminded me about this interview I did when my book first was released. Dr. Hamilton's baby soothing trick is discussed in my book. I appreciate this opportunity to share why I wrote this book. I hope you enjoy it

We are happy to welcome Dr. Sue Chan, Veterinarian and author of "T...

06/16/2026

https://sacramento.craigslist.org/grd/d/north-highlands-american-buff/7938540214.html

These are 3 month old geese hatched under our hens that are already full-size. They roam the driveway in a little pack and come running when they see food being passed out. Contrary to popular belief, our geese are not aggressive and many like to eat out of. your hand. We also have Embden and Emben/Toulouse crosses.

Phoenix Ranch in Vacaville is offering a two months old American Buff friendly (talkative)baby geese Also mixed breed Parents are not for sale

06/16/2026

https://sacramento.craigslist.org/grd/d/north-highlands-american-buff/7938536304.html
These little guys were hatched under our hens and now hang out with Dr. Sue at night so she can handle them daily and make them friendly. 5 left. Get them while they're fuzzy!

Phoenix Ranch in Vacaville is offering one week old American Buff baby geese

05/13/2026

Donations can be made through BuyMeACoffee with this QR code or directly through Zelle through [email protected]