No one is paid to muck out stalls lined with plywood boards or gather horses coated in springtime mud at Sunshine Horses. The cluster of workers braving another abnormally cold morning are all volunteers, and the horses are looking for new homes.

But Sunshine Horses is ready to leave its makeshift stalls and muddy fields behind. The equine rescue and rehabilitation center is moving from Central Square to a new barn in Clay, quite literally for greener pastures. It’ll be closer to Syracuse — a more convenient location for its volunteers — and have better trails, a bigger training arena and beautiful new stalls, said Sunshine President Kate Starr.

The facility is currently home to more than two dozen adoptable horses. Some are rescues taken in because the Central New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals doesn’t have an equine facility, Starr said. Others are Standardbreds — former cart-racing horses given to Sunshine because their owners wanted a safe retirement home. One Standardbred had brought in more than $800,000 in race winnings. Another didn’t race, but pulled carriages in New York City.

All breeds are welcome at Sunshine, but there’s a focus on Standardbreds that stems from Starr’s background.

“I used to train Standardbreds, and had a hard time seeing really nice saddle horses — types that could be nice saddle horses — shipped into trucks going to sales,” Starr said. “They’ll go to meat.”

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So, with a “burr underneath her skin,” Starr began Sunshine Horses back in 2001, and she hasn’t gotten a paycheck since. Sunshine is a nonprofit, volunteer-run operation that seeks to rehab, retrain and rehome horses with the right new owners. While they’re at Sunshine, horses need a $200 sponsorship to pay for their stall, food and care for a month.

Some of those sponsorships come from the volunteers who have fallen in love with a particular horse. And some of those volunteers, like Dawn Ellis, even take a horse home. It’s hard not to get attached to the horses at the barn, she said.

“It’s nice to find them homes, but also tears will fall because you know you’re losing a horse that you spent time with and you’ve come to love,” Ellis said. “You’re happy they’re going to a home, but it’s a tearjerker to see them go.”

Even with a horse at home, Ellis still comes to Sunshine regularly to coordinate volunteers and train Louisa — a dark brown, fine-boned mare who got out of racing at a young age and without injuries.

Jan Lower, another volunteer coordinator at Sunshine, has been attached to the nonprofit since she met Starr at a carnival in Skaneateles.

“I said, ‘I don’t have a horse anymore, my kids are grown-up and I love horses,’ and Kate came and hugged me,” Lower said. “That was it, I was hooked.”

That was 10 years ago. Today, Lower helps manage nearly 100 volunteers, a big spike from when she started.

“We had seven horses, and we got up to 14 and we panicked,” Lower said.

Now, with more than two dozen horses up for adoption and a handful of permanent residents, Sunshine has outgrown its home. Starr has bigger plans for Sunshine, and needs a bigger, better facility to fulfill them. The Central New York SPCA often calls to see if Starr can take in an unwanted horse, and she’d like to turn that into a permanent partnership at the new barn. She’d also like to team up with The Right Horse, an organization that shares Sunshine’s emphasis on training as the key to adoption.

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To buy its new facility — the former Hallston Manor in Clay — Sunshine must raise $750,000. A $125,000 grant is on the way from New York state, and Sunshine has received a $350,000 matching donation, Starr said. The next step is reaching out to the community and people in the Standardbred industry for donations. At the new location, Sunshine will be able to hold carriage rides, car shows and other fundraisers.

Sunshine will bring some tangible reminders of the barn that was its home for so long, including the fence posts that mark its pastures. The posts are named after well-loved horses who needed to be euthanized at Sunshine.

“When you have so many horses over so many years, you’re going to lose some either to colic or to old age,” Starr said. “So, I guess we’ll take our little posts and name our pastures after them at the other place.”

Published on April 17, 2018 at 8:41 pm

Contact Kathryn: kjkrawcz@syr.edu | @kathrynkrawczyk