Hello, I'm Nancy from THE HEALING BARN, I have a lot of great stories to tell you. Little Bit is just a tiny portion of the animals we have helped over the years. We (Allen, Nancy, and Corri) started The Healing Barn about 12 years ago. We had a three stall barn and 3 acres of turn out.

The intention was to get one horse for Corri, whom at the time was 11 years old. Immediately someone called and said, "I have a horse that needs be ridden. He is 4 years old and green broke. He is free, BUT you also have to take his 32 year old mother. At almost the same time the horse we had been looking at (safe, quiet, broke, etc.) came up for sale. So now instead of one horse we now had 3 horses.

Rebel the four year old, Sweetie Pie the old mare, and Crazy the only one Corri could ride. Crazy was 17 years old when we bought her. She was a nice horse most of the time, but as preteens go, when Corri was upset then so was Crazy. The more upset Corri got the worse Crazy became. I soon began to see a pattern in the connection between a person and an animal. This was an interesting connection to me. The other piece of the puzzle was this 32 year old mare, Sweetie Pie, was very arthritic. This is when my nursing skills kicked into gear. I knew I could make her more comfortable.

Her knees were huge from running barrels for such a long time. I started putting magnets on her knees. I was sure there was a change, she moved better and got up easier, the problem was she kept loosing the magnets in the sawdust. Remember this, that was many years ago there were not natural alternatives for horses. I would read 10 books to get 5 or 6 sentences that could help with my mission. The challenge was exciting. I knew I could help horses the way I had helped people. And so began The Healing Barn, Natural Healing Alternatives.

It became a huge challenge for me to get the right mixes to help the horses. I would go to the Health Food stores and get capsules and break apart 10-15 capsules while watching TV. I would feed these to the ailing horse or Donkey and they would get better. After about 2 years, Sweetie Pie took a big fall and did not get back up. It was then that we had to make the decision to put her down. That was a sad day, but it was time to let her go. Her son Rebel, whom was quite the mamma's boy, grieved for about 1 hour.

You think he needed to grieve longer; I would agree, but in the horse world there is no time. Besides Rebel had been trying to make eyes at Crazy, the horse across the aisle, for about two years. Every time the three of them were out together Sweetie Pie would squeeze in between Rebel and Crazy. As you know that was not cool to have your mom always in the way! So this leads us to the story of Rebel, the now five year old with the one year old mind.

Sincerely, Nancy