All for the love of wild ponies

Transcription

1 Vet Times The website for the veterinary profession All for the love of wild ponies Author : Emma Cooper Categories : RVNs Date : July 1, 2013 Emma Cooper speaks to award-winning volunteer Faye Stacey about Devon-based charity People4ponies SIX years ago, Faye Stacey gave up her high-flying job in finance to work as an unpaid volunteer, helping rehabilitate traumatised wild ponies. Since the day she first visited Devonbased charity People4ponies, she hasn t looked back. Alongside welfare and veterinary groups, she has campaigned to raise awareness of the outlawing of ear notching, which came into force in 2007, as part of a follow-up act to the 2006 Animal Welfare Act. Last year, Faye took over from People4ponies founders Paul and Cilla King as head of the charity. Along with managing the charity s resident and loaned ponies, Faye is now deeply involved in pushing for a ban on hot branding of horses across England and Wales. In April she was named UK Volunteer of the Year at the Ceva Awards for Animal Welfare for her equine welfare work. I caught up with her at the end of a long day. Earlier, Faye and other volunteers had tended to the charity s five resident ponies and been out scouring hedgerows for feed to supplement the diets of animals prone to laminitis, before returning home to catch up on correspondence with the RSPCA regarding the hot branding campaign. She explains how People4ponies is now at full capacity, caring for pony residents from the 1/8

2 immediate area. However, it also receives visitors from further afield. We ve got five ponies at our Witheridge yard in Devon four are part of the core group rescued by Paul and Cilla and one is from RSPCA, she says. We ve also got 16 being fostered or on loan and another five out grazing locally. We do get people coming to us too we ve had private owners who bought animals in a market in Wales, who then realised they couldn t get anywhere near them, so they brought the animals here to us. We worked with the ponies and then the owners were able to take them home. Faye was previously a stock-market analyst for news agency Reuters. She admits she always had a passion for horses, and she started saving up to go on horse whispering courses in her spare time, before doing some handling work with riding schools. I used to go to work every day and think I was in the wrong place, but now I feel like I was meant to do this it has definitely transformed my life, she says. Faye heard about the charity and its work with traumatised Exmoor, Dartmoor and Bodmin ponies and decided to pay a visit where she had a revelationary test of her new found horse whispering skills. She explains: When I first visited Paul and Cilla they had a pony that no one had been able to catch before and I caught him. It took about 15 minutes of trying to interact with him in a nonconfrontational way, trying to engage the horse s curiosity, and I ended up standing next to him. It s an amazing thing when you have a pony that s been traumatised by people and you go through that communication process with it, and then it starts to trust you. It s amazing to be able to break through that fear. The branding challenge Now Faye has set herself the task of fighting back against local farmers who brand their wild ponies. While ear mutilation is not exempt from prosecution under the The Mutilations (Permitted Procedures) (England) Regulations 2007, hot branding is. She estimates there are 500 to 600 wild ponies on Exmoor, 1,000 on Dartmoor, 1,000 in the New Forest and around 100 on Bodmin with common farmers particularly keen to start branding more animals on Bodmin moor. The commoners do see it as their tradition and their right to do it they don t want to move forward, they think it s traditional and that the horses don t feel pain, Faye says. 2/8

3 Not only is hot branding very painful, it s such an ineffective method of identification and not legally recognised as a method of identification. For example, they think Exmoor ponies are really difficult and unmanageable, but, if the animals have been sat on and branded, what do you expect? If they d just been microchipped instead you d have a completely different animal. We really need to get the message to these people that there is absolutely no need to go around branding animals with hot irons anymore. It s banned for cattle and they already do horse microchipping and scanning at markets they ve got a vet there, and a crush, and they re ready to go. Scotland and Northern Ireland have both banned hot branding. Charities, welfare groups and veterinary associations are campaigning hard to have the practice outlawed in England and Wales, but so far without success. Defra considered the issue last year, and has prompted farmers to sign up to a code of conduct on branding a move neither the farmers themselves nor anti-branding campaigners see as a satisfactory next step. Faye says: They ve written up these rules of conduct, but the farmers can still do pretty much whatever they want, with no one to stop them. We re at a sticking point where there should be a ban. All the welfare groups and veterinary groups want it banned, and Defra is trying to get along with halfway measures. Who s going to enforce this [code]? Faye extended an open invitation for people to visit the charity if they are interested in People4ponies work, and appealed to VN Times readers to research the anti-branding campaign and back it by writing to MPs. If there are any VNs who have seen cases of branding and branding wounds, that would also be helpful in terms of providing more evidence for the cause. Faye also urged supporters to consider fund-raising, saying any proceeds, however small, would go a long way to helping provide for new equine residents. None of us gets paid for the work we do all the money goes to the ponies and the anti-branding campaign work. It s so important to us the money goes where it should. It s all about the ponies and getting things changed for them the best future for them will be if these branding mutilations don t happen in the first place. 3/8

4 To find out more about People4ponies and the work of its volunteers, visit Faye handling a wild foal for the first time. 4/8

5 5/8

6 A pony gets a full check over, assisted by the People4ponies volunteers. 6/8

7 Faye receiving her Ceva UK Volunteer Animal Welfare Award from vet Marc Abraham. 7/8

8 A hot branding mark two weeks after branding, on a horse submitted to People4ponies. 8/8 Powered by TCPDF (