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Rebuilding trust
Caroline Mulstay, manager and adoption coordinator at Equine Rescue of Aiken, nuzzles Baby, one of the farm’s greatest success stories. The horse arrived at the farm 500 pounds underweight and close to death from starvation. Today, Baby is thriving and learning to trust humans again.
Photo by Tim Hanson
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On a mission
On a mission
A divorce and midlife crisis led founder Jim Rhodes to launch Equine Rescue of Aiken, which has saved more than 1,000 animals to date. “I feel that everything I’ve done in my life has led me to do this—to help animals find homes,” he says. “It is like I have come full circle.”
Photo by Tim Hanson
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Meet Stephanie
Abandoned at birth and still requiring medical care for a bum leg, Stephanie the donkey has become a symbol of the work Equine Rescue of Aiken performs for injured, abused and neglected animals.
Photo by Tim Hanson
By the time the little donkey named Stephanie showed up at Jim Rhodes’ horse rescue farm near Aiken, she had been through a harrowing first year.
She was rejected by her mother at birth because of a bum leg, and lived for months at a veterinary clinic where she underwent surgery to correct a contracted tendon that makes it difficult for her to stand. She endured endless rounds of physical therapy and a steady regimen of pain medication, and to this day wears a custom-made brace.
But Stephanie now lives happily with nearly 60 other horses as a permanent resident at Equine Rescue of Aiken. Some of those animals are thoroughbred racehorses that for one reason or another could not cut it at the track. Others show up at the farm so badly abused and malnourished that they are within days of dying. And while not all of those animals can be saved, every effort is made to restore their health—and their badly shaken trust in humans.
By most any standard, Rhodes, president and managing director of the equine rescue, has led something of a textured life. He was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, but soon thereafter was given up for adoption. But, not unlike the equine charges at his farm, he found himself in a loving home.
“I was adopted by a family that was in the diplomatic service,” Rhodes says. “My earliest life was spent overseas—Ethiopia, Turkey, Japan, Germany—and I got to experience many different cultures.”
As an adult, he earned an engineering degree and worked as an electrical engineer for nearly 30 years. He also ran a successful auction business that focused largely on farm equipment and horses.
By the time he hit 50, he had fully embraced a midlife crisis, punctuated by a divorce and a solo two-month road trip around the United States. Says Rhodes: “I was trying to find out who I was and to discover what I wanted to do.”
Within a year after his return to Aiken, things began to sort themselves out, and with the establishment of his nonprofit equine rescue farm, the direction for the rest of his life was set.
“I feel that everything I’ve done in my life has led me to do this—to help animals find homes,” he says, adding that 1,000 horses have been saved since the rescue’s founding. “It is like I have come full circle.”
While Equine Rescue of Aiken has two or three high-dollar benefactors, most of the financial support for the organization’s annual half-million-dollar operating costs comes from individual donations ranging from as little as a few dollars up to $1,000, a sum that elicits an excited involuntary whoop from Rhodes whenever a check for that amount shows up at his office.
Those donations also help let Rhodes broaden the scope of services offered at the farm.
For more than five years, for example, Rhodes has made his facility and horses available to the nonprofit Saratoga WarHorse program, a three-day workshop that pairs retired thoroughbreds with military veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress (PTS). The aim of the program is to help veterans move past psychological issues and secure a firmer grip on their lives in the civilian world.
Rhodes says that there is something about the interaction between human and horse, a certain emotional bonding that takes place, that helps veterans achieve valuable personal breakthroughs.
“A connection between them may take five minutes or 40 minutes,” Rhodes says. “And for most it is life changing. Classes of six to eight vets are held here twice each month. This year, I think we will have hosted more than 400 veterans.”
In addition, Rhodes works with the local courts by making the rescue available so that individuals can perform court-ordered community service. He also works with the juvenile justice system, which sometimes directs teenagers who are on a collision course with the law to spend time at the farm working with horses.
But at the heart of the rescue is its mission of saving as many horses as possible.
Day-to-day operations are handled by manager Caroline Mulstay and assistant manager Caitlin Brady. They work with a brigade of horse-loving volunteers who help feed and water the horses, clean stables, repair the more than two miles of fencing on the property, keep the grass mowed, and perform any number of other seemingly endless chores necessary to keep the 80-acre farm up and running.
“All of these horses have a special place in our hearts,” says volunteer Nina Briggs, a Canadian transplant who moved to Aiken a half-dozen years ago. When she first settled in the area, Briggs volunteered five days a week until her American work permit was issued and she began teaching elementary school.
Since then, she stays connected by volunteering on weekends, holidays and during summers. And each Christmas, instead of a standard children’s Christmas party in the classroom, Briggs organizes and leads a trip to the farm for her fourth grade students.
“We call it ‘Christmas With a Cause,’” Briggs says. “And our cause is Aiken Equine Rescue.”
The children bring a variety of donations—tack, grooming supplies, feed, carrots, horse cookies, apples—and spend time visiting the horses and learning about how the rescue helps these animals. The school trip, Briggs adds, often triggers an interest by parents, who later visit the farm with their sons and daughters to pitch in and help wherever they can. “We are teaching our youth to give back to the community,” she says.
Volunteers, Briggs says, become emotionally attached to the animals on the farm, especially the ones they work with on a regular basis. And while they know that most of the horses will be adopted at some point, she says there is a feeling of personal loss when the adoption actually takes place.
“But you cannot be selfish,” she says. “This is about finding these horses a home where they can live out the rest of their lives.”
As Mulstay went about her work in the barn one Sunday last July, she kept a close eye on Baby, a horribly emaciated 5-year-old thoroughbred that had been brought to the farm a week earlier. Everyone at the rescue agreed that it was the worst starvation case they had ever seen. The thoroughbred weighed about 700 pounds—some 500 pounds underweight.
“He was literally on death’s door,” Mulstay says. “When you say ‘skin and bones’ that is exactly what he was. He would not have survived more than a couple of days had we not gotten him here to the farm.”
Since Baby arrived at the farm, he has regained much of the weight he had lost and is well on his way to hitting the 1,200-pound mark, the average weight for a horse.
“Once we get him to 100 percent, there is no reason why he cannot go on and live a full life and just be a normal horse,” Mulstay says. “He is a neat horse who loves people and I think he is going to have a great life.”
One of the newer additions to the farm is Walker, a Tennessee walker foal whose mother died about a month after he was born. The owners tried to bottle feed the colt, but the procedure did not go well. When the colt’s owners realized they could not afford the considerable expense of finding a suitable nurse mare, they surrendered the young horse and he ended up at the rescue farm.
“Walker’s new mama is named Gucci,” Mulstay says. “She is a great mom. Very sweet. And Walker is doing great. He is healthy and running around being a typical foal, causing trouble and providing entertainment for everybody.”
Not all horses at the rescue, of course, will be adopted. Instead, they will live out their lives on the farm, being cared for by volunteers like Mary Benko, a retiree who has donated her time there for more than a decade.
“We really try to make every horse feel special,” Benko says.
After Hurricane Irma roared through Immokalee, Florida, in 2017, more than two dozen horses were found wandering the streets. Four of the animals were never claimed, and the farm ended up accepting them, including a Shetland pony who was later named Wellington.
The stocky little horse measures maybe 40 inches from his shoulder tip to the ground. He is a fancy looking palomino, Mulstay says, who loves kids.
“He runs to the fence when they show up.,” she says. “We let the kids give him baths and feed him treats and walk him around.”
Maybe as important as being an overall ambassador for the rescue is the fact that Wellington is fast friends with Stephanie the donkey.
Sometimes, Rhodes reflects on his decision to provide a home for Stephanie and pay her medical bills, which he says have amounted to “a small fortune.” For that same amount of money, he concedes that he might have been able to help 10 other animals.
But he realizes that the amount of goodwill the donkey generates for the rescue has been considerable and figures that maybe, in the end, it all balances out.
“She is as sweet as she can be,” Rhodes says. “She is loving and cute—and a good story for the rescue. She was worth it.”
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Get More
To learn about Equine Rescue of Aiken, visit aikenequinerescue.org or call (803) 643-1850.