Heya! This is Katharina Engelhardt, Kat for short and I’ll be John’s guest blogger today! I visited Tracy from All God’s Creatures today; she runs a horse sanctuary in Phoenix and currently gives 5 horses a lifetime home. Each of them had a rather unlucky life until they came to Tracy: a former surrogate mare, an off-the-track Thoroughbred, an abandoned Arabian that still shows some of his wild behavior as well as a stallion with immune system problems who wasn’t supposed to survive his first year but thanks to Tracy’s care he is 11 years old now and still counting.

Caroline and John dropped me off at Tracy’s in the early morning when it wasn’t super hot yet. Due to my hay allergy, I couldn’t help them feed, but I still petted all the horses and helped Tracy and her helper Rachel brush them.

Tracy and I talked a lot about horse stuff, and somehow we found out that she still has her old Breyer model horses, the same brand that most of my models are from too. What a coincidence! I never thought I’d ever see the models Tracy has in person as they’re mostly from the 1970s and quite rare nowadays. It also turned out that she saw some of the real horses that I have as a model in person!

A little later Rachel lunged the grey horse Charlie and in the meantime, Jack and Dollar ran around in their paddocks. At 17hh (17 hands) tall Charlie is quite the giant, but a very gentle one. Funny enough, he looks like a twin to the horse of one of my friends in Germany!

Dollar the Arabian is usually a black horse but can’t stand being clean and keeps rolling around until he gets brown. He had about 4 or 5 rolls during the time I was there!

I ended up staying much longer than planned so John picked me up for lunch at midday instead of in the morning. The temperature got too hot to be outside at some point…

Thank you for reading!

~Kat

Thank you, Kat, for blogging here on the site that chronicles the lives of John and Caroline Wise, and thank you, Tracy, for allowing our niece to spend some time with you and the horses today.