Bransby Horses

“Emerald was emaciated and suffering from exhaustion – she required round-the-clock care from our team to bring her back from the brink.”

“Nursing Emerald back to full health took months. It was one of the most shocking cases of neglect our team had ever seen,” says Emma Carter, Bransby Horses’ Executive Director of Equine Welfare. When Emerald was rescued from a stable in Nottinghamshire by Bransby Horses and the RSPCA, it was touch and go as to whether she would survive. Emerald is just one of many severely neglected horses to have been rescued by Bransby Horses, and the charity has received a welcome financial boost with a £15,000 grant from SEIB.

One of the UK’s largest equine welfare charities, Bransby Horses provides rescue and welfare services for horses and ponies along with donkeys and mules, with a focus on rehabilitation and careful handling to give animals a second lease of life. Currently, they have around 900 animals in their care across their own sites or in foster homes, and in order to keep up their vital work they rely entirely on public funding.

“We are absolutely delighted with the incredible £15,000 awarded to us by SEIB,” says Sally Crawford, Bransby Horses’ Executive Director of Engagement and Income Generation. “The COVID-19 pandemic has meant that we’ve had to close our visitor centre – a vital source of funding – for several months, and this has obviously had a serious impact on our charity work. This, on the back of the devastation caused by flooding in November 2019, has meant working has been tougher than usual. The money we’ve been so kindly awarded will go towards purchasing an all-terrain vehicle which we can use at our Barlings site where over 50 horses and ponies have been moved as a result of our Bransby land being ravaged by the floods.”

In previous years the SEIB Charity Awards required that the grants should be used for a specific project. However, in light of COVID-19, SEIB realised how difficult it would be for charities to operate this year and have been much more flexible about how the money can be used. For Bransby Horses, the grant was an equine lifeline, enabling them to carry on with their work in preventing and relieving cruelty to horses and to protect them from unnecessary suffering.