Donating My Money

For Christmas 2008, I asked family and friends to not buy me any gifts. Instead, I wanted them to either donate to a charity, or to give me money to donate to a charity of my choice. My charity of choice was a horse rescue. Surprise. Surprise. I had many requirements for the rescue that would recieve my money. One was that they must rescue horses from kill pens/horse-slaughter auctions or directly donate money to places that do so, such as Alex Brown Racing/Friends of Barbaro. I am opposed to the inhumane treatment of animals, and until someone proves to me otherwise, I consider horse slaughter to be inhumane. We can debate about this later, but let me assure you that I have spent hundreds of hours researching both sides of the issue!! Now I thought it would be easy finding the "perfect-in-my-mind" horse rescue. After all, there are thousands. I put my list of requirements in front of me and started Googling. Hours, days, weeks later, I had my list down to two places. It was now time to start making phone calls, and emailing with specific questions. I know this sounds extreme, but I don't very often have extra money to give away, so I was being fussy! Here's my gripe. Neither place ever returned my multiple calls or emails. I know they are very busy and use volunteers, but don't say on your website things like "email for a list of feed stores, hay suppliers, veterinarians, etc, to send your money directly" if your not going to email back. I am not going to "blindly" send you my money without some kind of human contact! This,to me,is bad business. What if I was someone that was going to be regularly sending money, or on my deathbed and looking for someone to inherit my millions! At about this time I got an email from someone forwarding the story of a TB that was rescued from a kill pen. I know that lots of TBs are rescued from slaughter, but this one caught my eye because of his name which was/is "Clever Allemont". One of our polo horses is "Twilight Trick" by "Clever Trick". Its turns out that the horses are half brothers. I figure this must be a message from above. So, I sent some of my Christmas money to Winding Road Equine Rescue & Retirement in KS who found Clever Allemont, and some to Old Friends TB Retirement, which is where he is now retired. I still have a little in the bank which is collecting interest (though not very much) until the "Perfect Rescue" comes along.