You probably know about sanctuaries for dogs, cats, fish, and hamsters (etc.), but did you know there are sanctuaries for horses? Healing Hearts is one of those. They usually get horses from killing pens and people who can't take care of them. It takes $250 to feed a horse for a month. The horses there get a minimum of one vet visit per year, but some horses that need extra help will get a few more. Most of the horses there get adopted, but some die before. Healing Hearts keeps a binder of the horses that get adopted and the ones who die. They even have a folder where they keep track of who was sick.

A story of how they got six of their horses they have right now is: a trainer had a lot of horses and trained with them, but one day they found out that she had a disease where she would forget to do stuff — like she would forget to feed the horses and leave them in cross ties, stuff like that. So Healing Hearts went and asked to take the horses and find a better home for them, and of course she didn't like the idea, but in the end she gave them six of the horses. Three of them died because they couldn't take it anymore, but they still have three.

Right now they have sixteen horses including the three I was just talking about, and five of them found homes! Healing Hearts has been at three different locations, but they moved to Arizona to get more volunteers. Most of their horses are on the older side, but they have a few young ones — the oldest is thirty two and the youngest is one. The average age of a horse is twenty five. There is one horse there that can't chew hay because it has bad teeth, another got its cannon bone twisted — they take in so many injured horses who don't get treated nicely. A few of the horses are on Equisul, which is like Tylenol for horses.

It is important to have these sanctuaries because a lot of horses are going to be saved. Maybe we should have one in Minneapolis? A national park? You decide.

Cross ties: where you put a horse to put saddles and bridles on them. (Bridles and saddles are what you use to ride a horse.) Cannon bone: like a horse's shin. Killing pens: where horses go if they are old, injured, unwanted, or can't be ridden, so they kill them.