Spring Creek Horse Rescue celebrated its 50th year saving horses, but its long tenure doesn’t exempt it from financial and volunteer struggles.
Diane McCracken is the operator of Spring Creek Horse Rescue, which started in 1976. She said she prefers to be called the operator or director because “I don’t think anyone owns this.”
The rescue saves equines of all kinds, from horses to ponies to mules. Spring Creek Horse Rescue does have adoptable horses when they’re in good enough health, but many of them aren’t adoptable, so the rescue keeps the horses until they die, she said. If they’re injured or ill, they still have a home at Spring Creek Horse Rescue as long as there’s space.
“You can tell that his hip is bad,” McCracken said about one of her mules. “How long he’ll last, I don’t know, but we love him anyway.”
Taking in elderly horses is one of the reasons the rescue has been in operation for so long. She has one horse on the property that is 44 years old.
“We take in older horses, and then we’re stuck with them until they die,” McCracken said
But even with a storied past, she admitted she’s looking for donations, though she doesn’t want to beg. Additional volunteer help is also needed, because McCracken has her hands full with 30 horses on the 35-acre property. The rescue is at capacity, she said.
She knows the names and past of all 30 horses and can’t help but fall in love with each one and “get really attached,” she said.
“How do you not care for them?” she asked.
The rescue is a full-time job for McCracken, and one that doesn’t give her the opportunity for vacation or time off. She has one employee who started a couple of weeks ago after responding to an ad she put on Facebook asking for help. What McCracken really needs, she said, are donations and volunteers who will do the grunt work.
She said interested people can reach out to her via email with their availability and she’ll “put them to work.” McCracken said the ideal volunteer shift is a full-day gig from 7:30 a.m. to around 4 p.m., because the volunteers get to know the horses better. The rescue hasn’t had a consistent volunteer base since COVID-19, she said, which is also when their horse inventory increased.
“We need people to work, actually, and not just groom – there’s a little bit of grooming, but not all day long,” she said.
McCracken’s helper, as she called him, works from 7:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday to Friday. He’s off on the weekends, and without volunteers it’s just her handling feeding and turnout, or the time the horses spend out in the pasture or paddocks. It takes her all day, she said.
“I get up at about 5 a.m., and there’s not a day off, not with this many horses,” she said.
The rescue was never a plan for McCracken, but when it started, she never looked back. She said that back in 1976, the Humane Society had two impounds and “it just went from there.”
gwallace@durangoherald.com
