Cosmo and Sea Briar were taking turns yawning Monday afternoon.
The brown saddlebred and black thoroughbred were both falling asleep in the winter sunlight as Live and Let Live director Teresa Paradis approached them with a bale of hay.
“Hi, sleepyheads,” Paradis said, opening the gate to their paddock at the resuce farm in Chichester. The horses walked over to her and began snacking eagerly.
“You’re a good boy,” she said to Cosmo, giving him a gentle pat on the neck. “Lots of people love you.”
Paradis said Cosmo, the brown horse, was close to death just two months ago. He was rescued from St. Francis Farm Sanctuary & Rescue in Langdon on Nov. 21, along with eight other horses – including Sea Briar – who Paradis said were all emancipated and malnourished.
But now, Cosmo is rehabilitating quickly. He’s already moved from a one to a five on the Henneke horse body condition scoring system scale – a healthy weight for horses.
“He’s doing so unbelievably well,” Paradis said. “He wins the blue ribbon for rehabilitation.”
Seventeen more horses were removed from St. Francis Farm Sanctuary & Rescue on Friday, State Police Lt. Mike Kokoski said. Fifteen were brought to area shelters, and two were allowed to stay with volunteers.
Kokoski said no charges have been brought against St. Francis Farm Sanctuary & Rescue’s owner, Olex Beck, but that an investigation is open. He said the horses were taken because of an “underlying concern over the general living and health condition of the animals.”
Beck, who spoke to the Monitor in November when her first nine horses were taken away, said financial difficulties in recent months had been a strain on her farm, which she said she has operated for 12 years.
Beck said at the time that the horses that were taken from her farm had come to her shortly before they were removed and were already “very debilitated.” Beck, who works with horses who are old, sickly or have no one to care for them, said she was working to rehabilitate them.
Beck she said in November that she planned to work with a veterinarian to make sure the animals still living on her farm stayed healthy. She said she hoped to be able to get the organization back on its feet.
“Rescues are not a dime a dozen and it’s a very hard life. It was very, very painful – it still is,” she said, in November of having her animals taken away.
But she wasn’t able to get back on her feet quickly enough, Paradis said. All of Beck’s remaining horses were taken away Friday. The Facebook page for St. Francis Farm Sanctuary & Rescue is no longer active.
The 15 horses were taken to various rehabilitation centers, including Draft Gratitude in Winchester, a rescue that specializes in rehabilitating draft horses.
Live and Let Live would have taken in some of them, Paradis said, but they had no space available.
Representatives from the state have been coming to check on the horses every 30 days, Paradis said. Paradis said part of what convinced authorities that the horses might be being mistreated at St. Francis, and not just arriving there already sick, was how quickly Cosmo – who was the sickliest horse of the bunch when he arrived at Live & Let Live – started to get better once he was being nourished consistently.
“They knew it was a matter of dehydration of starvation,” Paradis said. “They built up their case, went back there and took more.”
Usually, a horse in that kind of condition can take six months to a year to fully recover, Paradis said. She said it’s amazing the transformation both horses have made in a short time.
“They were cranky when they came in because of the dehydration and starvation – it’s painful,” she said. “But now, they are love bugs.”