Kentucky Farm Committed to Animal Rescue and Healing

Photo by Boo Hardy

With the stated mission of rescuing and rehabilitating native wildlife, Karen Bailey of Summer Wind Farm in Kentucky, works about 20 hours a day in a volunteer capacity to help heal the animals. She wouldn't have it any other way.

A secondary aspect of the goal of Bailey is to "improve the welfare of wildlife through education.”

...Bailey is perhaps the most devoted, sensitive, intelligent, entertaining, and determined animal lover you will ever meet. She has turned her Kentucky home into a bustling, respected wildlife rehabilitation center that last year took in about 500 injured or orphaned animals and, as she does every year, eventually releases nearly every one. They include raccoons, possums, pigs, skunks, deer, groundhogs, foxes, coyotes, beavers, and otters. Most were babies who lost their mothers, but some were beaten by humans, struck by cars, or mauled by other animals. And they come not only from individuals, vets, and animal shelters but also from some of the most prestigious farms, including Ashford, Taylor Made, Spendthrift, and Lane’s End.

 

Look out her dining-room windows, and you see an otter pond and a field of pigs, and beyond them the grassy fields and four-plank fences of a first-rate horse farm. Bailey’s home and her Kentucky Wildlife Center sit on Summer Wind Farm near Lexington − “a little boutique of usually pretty well-bred yearlings,” Bailey says.

 

Bailey’s parents, Jane and Frank Lyon Jr., started Summer Wind in 1995 after operating an agricultural farm in Little Rock, Ark. It was Bailey’s mother’s dream to have a horse farm in the Bluegrass.

According to Bailey, she says this prayer for every animal that comes into the center: “Dear Father, here and bless thy beast and singing birds and guard with tenderness the small things that have no words.”

I think a few people are saying prayers for Bailey as well.

continue reading ...

Bailey's website: kywildlife.org