12 • April 24, 2013 • Snoqualmie Valley Record
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Members of the local Youth Club of the Washington State Quarter Horse Youth Association have a big heart for horses. Club members named Rancho Laguna’s H.E.A.R.T. (Home of Equine Assisted Rescue Therapy) ranch in Snoqualmie as their charity of choice for 2013. Besides donating funds, the club members are committing their volunteer hours to the ranch, spending hours this winter organizing bins of tack donations, picking stalls, and grooming rescue horses and donkeys. Tina Laguna, owner and director of Rancho Laguna’s HEART, is a long-time Quarter Horse Association member and board member. Tina Laguna pastCapucine Zimmerman,youth club member, interviewed Tina to learn how her non-profit got its start and hear stories behind the rescue horses and donkeys. “I’ve been rescuing horses my entire life,” said Tina. In 2006 she opened her doors to the public. “I wanted to just fill in where there was a need. Every now and then someone would call about a neglected animal.” When Tina bought her ranch near Snoqualmie Falls in 2000, she boarded horses and rescued others. She had one boarder that “just never came back. That person never really cared about her horse. It’s unbelievable to me that someone would buy a beautiful creature just for show and not love and care for it.” Today, one of those abandoned horses is a therapy horse named We would like to take off IAMS and Eukanuba and replace it Truman. Tina tries toBest “adopt many as possible but some just with more pictures of our Seller:out” Taste as of the Wild (below).
“Horses will push you hard because they know.”
clock when a new rescue horse first arrives. “The first two weeks are vital and usually will indicate, for those in the worst of health, whether or not they will survive” Tina said. “The rescues are usually emaciated and in bad shape. Sometimes they are so weak they cannot get up. Typically, after the initial two- week period, they are gaining weight and on the road to recovery.” Sadly however, some just don’t make it. With emotions in her voice, Tina shares the story of “Rocky Man” who had been hanging in there eating some, but not enough. “He had been fed such horrible things in his previous environment that his body had already begun to shut down,” she said. While Tina is always sad at the loss of a rescue, she is happy that he spent the last weeks of his life at Rancho Laguna’s HEART surrounded by loving, caring friends. Other rescues happily move on to families who are thrilled to adopt them. Ruby is the most recent to be placed in her forever home. Ruby and her mom, Big Rose, age 30, came to Tina together. Big Rose was 450 to 500 pounds underweight, and the worst case Tina has ever seen. Mom and baby were so severely underweight they could not lie down, even with stalls full of extra shavings. Tina never gave up, and with added pads, blankets and shavings she made them comfortable while building their health and weight back up. Ruby became the love of a little girl named Gia, who volunteered at HEART last summer and adopted her. What led Tina to create the emotional therapy program? “It’s a personal story,” she says. “Horses will push you hard because they know. A woman I worked with this year had just lost her
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don’t get adopted. Instead, they become permanent fixtures at Rancho Laguna’s HEART and become wonderful therapy horses. While Tina understands the benefits of equine physical therapy programs, she is currently focused on her main program, emotional therapy. This program helps people in need of grief counseling, and those who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, Courtesy photo chemical dependenBarbara Crosby, WSQHYA Fundraising cy and addictions. It Chair, gives a smooch to Elmer the don- made an impact on key at Rancho Laguna. one group of military veterans, who recently came out to HEART and built an outhouse with wheelchair access. Asked how big an endeavor it is to become a non-profit, Tina happily says, “It’s a lot of work, but we love it.” Tina and HEART co-founder Anna Lvova work around the
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