Local facility helps save dying horses

PEMBROKE PINES, Fla. (WSVN) -- Horses found starving were saved just days away from death.

Their painful to look at. Two horses were found so underfed, their ribs were poking through their dull coat. You could count the vertebrae, and their hip bones were protruding.

Jade is blind in one eye, entirely dependent on the other horse. "She may be small, but she should be much fatter," said an employee of F.R.I.E.N.D.S., the group that rescued the horses.

The emaciated animals join two other underfed horses picked up from what was once a rescue facility in Parkland. "There is nowhere else for them to go," said Chelsea Madison. "The people that give them to us don't give them to us because they have money, they give them to us because they don't have money."

Two of the horses are a mother-daughter pair. Miss Rudy is a forgotten thoroughbred racehorse, now 400 pounds underweight. "This horse is in horrible condition," said Madison. "She's in her early 20s, she should not look like this. There's no horse that should look like this. If you feel her neck, you can feel her vertebrae."

At best guess, the horses were fed every three days for months. "It wasn't good quality," said Madison. "She wasn't digesting it. You can see that in her feces."

Slowly, they'll nurse all four horses back to health. "There's going to be eight of them," said Madison. "They're all going to need their feet done, their teeth done, they're going to need vaccinations."

Their weight is what's obvious, but everything about them has been forgotten. Now, they'll be living the way they should have all along. "I've been doing this a long time," said Madison, "and it's very hard to see them get to this point."

The horses have improved in the few hours they have been taken care of, but it will take months before they can be back to normal.

F.R.I.E.N.D.S. is the only rescue facility left in Broward County. It will cost thousands of dollars to get these horses fixed. The organization needs all the help they can get with donations and volunteers. If you would like to help these neglected horses, visit http://www.eiahorses.org.

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