Fresh from Quarantine (QT) 
Last weekend we brought five horses home from auction thanks to your support - a thin teenage mare with eye and leg injuries, a young colt blind in one eye, and three unhandled approximately 7-8 month old "fillies."
We've been quiet about them but a lot has happened this week, so here's an update!
First ... four of the five are sick, with snotty noses, cough, and swollen lymph nodes. The high probability of illness among horses in the auction pipeline is why we do quarantine, so while we aren't super worried about it, we have limited their care to basically one person per day, so photos and updates are limited.
Unfortunately, this will extend their QT time as they must remain in QT at least three weeks after their symptoms subside AND we will need to thoroughly clean and disinfect the QT area, so we are not planning on attending auction on April 5. 
Our other QT area is holding the BLM boys so we simply don't have anywhere to quarantine new auction horses for now.
Also, we have some name changes! One of the "fillies" turned out to be a colt, so his name of Louisa just doesn't work. We've had a Louis and wanted to stay with the Encanto them so his name is now Felix! We think it's super cute. With that change, the other two fillies became Mirabel and Isabella and to avoid having two Bella names, we have renamed Isabella to Peppa, also from Encanto, but also in honor of Pepper who we lost at the same time as Hamilton.
So that makes the names as follows:
One-eyed yearling colt: Bruno
Bay filly: Mirabel
Dun filly: Peppa
Bay colt: Felix
Which brings us to the teenage mare, who we named Dolores. She also has a new (to us) name, her original name, which is Diamond.
Diamond's story is part of the reason we've been quiet, as it breaks our heart a little bit. She came with a Coggins from Kansas, and when we googled the name and address it brought up a non-profit equine therapy program. Baffled how she went from a therapy program in Kansas to standing injured and thin in a loose sale pen in South Dakota in a period of two weeks, so we sent a quick email in case she had been sold to someone who lied to them and didn't know what happened to her. While they did respond, and shared her name and that she had been donated to their program from a family near Colorado Springs, Colorado where she was born and spent her entire life, they also said when they decided she wasn't a good fit for their program their trainer took her to the Billings, Wyoming sale, where she entered the auction and slaughter pipeline. Her Coggins was drawn on 2/17 in Kansas, she found herself at sale the weekend of 2/21-2/23 in Billings, Wyoming, where she was purchased by a broker for the various southern lots. She lost weight and was injured and found herself in a loose pen in Corsica, South Dakota on March 1 ... where because of her condition, she became our number on priority. Not only was she thin, had an injured eye and both knees scraped up bad, but she was already starting to become sick... all in a period of a few weeks.
That, folks, is the auction pipeline at work. If we hadn't chosen her, she'd likely have been bought by another broker and taken south to the kill pens, or maybe to another auction like the Kalona , Iowa auction held last Monday ... or perhaps her time would have been up and she'd have gone straight to Mexico.
The therapy program assured us they would notify her previous owners that she was with us, but I'm not sure how that conversation would go, so I doubt they will. So if you know anyone near Colorado Springs who had a lovely mare named Diamond that they donated to a therapy program in Kansas ... let them know about our Diamond, and that she's safe. We'd love to hear from her original family. Generally, anyone who donates their horse to a therapy program or rescue loves and wants the best for their horse, and is trying to keep them safe ... not on their way to slaughter.
So ... lots of changes for our QT horses, but the good news is they are here, they are safe, and getting the care they need.