{"id":53849,"date":"2022-03-02T11:00:47","date_gmt":"2022-03-02T16:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staging.saltriverwildhorsemanagementgroup.org\/?p=53849"},"modified":"2022-03-30T16:58:32","modified_gmt":"2022-03-30T20:58:32","slug":"happy-6th-birthday-rosco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staging.saltriverwildhorsemanagementgroup.org\/?p=53849","title":{"rendered":"Happy 6th Birthday, Rosco!"},"content":{"rendered":"

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March 2nd<\/h3>\n

We are celebrating Rosco’s Rescue and at the same time his 6th🎂 birthday today 3.2.22!<\/p>\n

Once upon a time in the Tonto National Forest, (on the evening 🌙✨of March 2nd, 2016), there lay a shivering brand new foal all by himself in a field. Luckily, nearby, some Salt River Wild Horse Management Group volunteers (SRWHMG) were watching and waiting for his mom to come back, but sadly, she never did.<\/p>\n

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A half-hour earlier, the volunteers had witnessed in horror as the foal was being attacked by a new stallion of the band. This stallion did not let the mare return to the foal she just delivered. This was something we had never seen before, and have never seen since.<\/p>\n

We did not have any agreements yet at that time, but Simone called the Forest Service and the AZDA Ag inspector, who then gave permission to rescue Rosco. He would have suffered a slow and cruel death all alone without the very important colostrum a newborn foal needs to survive. (the first mother’s milk with antibodies)<\/p>\n

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SRWHMG volunteers carefully picked up the shaking newborn and loaded him on a blanket in an SUV. Then our field team🚗 drove around late at night to find him the important colostrum.<\/p>\n

In addition to the colostrum, he also needed plasma to gain strength, which was administered by our vet. From that point on Simone and our SRWHMG volunteers stayed with him around the clock, he was never alone and was fed his milk replacer🍼 every hour.<\/p>\n

Rosco now had a new family, the SRWHMG family. But we knew that a real horse🐴 mom would be ideal for him, so after a long search on the internet and placing ads, we came across April who had lost her own foal at birth. She was so distraught about it that she had stopped eating or drinking and this is why her owner was looking for a foal for her.<\/p>\n

However, the pairing up did not go quite as easy as we had hoped. After Rosco had learned to be fed by humans, he did not recognize the mare as his mom and did not want to drink from her, and April wasn\u2019t quite sure about this little wild horse either.<\/p>\n

But SRWHMG never gives up. After trying for days, the moment when Rosco finally latched on for the first time was quite exciting! And from that moment on\u2026\u2026Rosco was her baby! They saved eachother and it was the best thing ever.
\nOf course, everyone at SRWHMG fell in love with sweet April, and we ended up purchasing her for 2000 dollars, which was all the money we had at the time. April was a wonderful surrogate mom to Rosco, and later she also was a surrogate mom for Pacman (more about that when we do Pacman\u2019s story)<\/p>\n

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Like April helped Rosco, so did Rosco help April. And like we helped Rosco survive, so did he play an important role in helping us survive and become who we are today. Rosco taught us how much work it takes and how many volunteers we needed. We also realized that to be succesful in humane management, we needed our own rescue facility and our own foal barn.<\/p>\n

Today we continue to build up our modest, yet functional facility along the Beeline, bordering the Tonto National Forest. We have since successfully rescued 18 other dying or orphaned Salt River wild horses, who all get to live happily ever after together. We will never forget our first rescue, sweet Rosco, who turns 6 years old today.<\/p>\n

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