Something Unexpected
There were two weeks in October that didn’t go as I expected.
On Monday, October 9th, my wife was following the developing Northern California fires online when she saw that they were woefully shorthanded at the large animal evacuation site near us. We decided to spend a few hours the next morning volunteering. Those few hours turned into much more.
Soon after arriving to volunteer, we were assigned to watch a barn and help care for the animals, mostly horses. The instructions to volunteers were that the horses needed water, walking, and food. But, there were a ton of volunteers and the waters were getting checked every 10 minutes and people with little horse experience were walking them. At one point, our barn had seven animals and 12 people trying to help. Everyone meant well but it was stressing the animals out. Then when a horse got stressed four people would try to calm it… which didn’t help.