BREWER, Maine — When three Girl Scouts in Troop 911 learned some horses that broke free from a Bangor barn in September had been adopted by a horse rescue operation in Prentiss, they wondered what they could do to help care for the animals.
“We were very happy someone was helping horses,” MacKenzie Hanson, one of the Girl Scouts, said Thursday in an email interview.
The trio of Scouts — Hanson, Katie Byrne and Jana Farrington — went to the Last Stop Horse Rescue to visit the animals and came back with a plan to make crafts and sell them to help provide for their care and feeding. The girls will be at Tractor Supply on Broadway in Bangor between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. Saturday to sell their homemade holiday items.
Joyce Pomeroy, who opened the 20-acre rescue operation about eight years ago on Tar Ridge Road, also will be on hand Saturday with a couple of miniature horses she rescued.
“This is an amazing group of girls who have been at the rescue touching the horses here,” Pomeroy said of the Brewer Scouts.
When the Scouts visited, there were 19 horses, goats and other animals living at the Last Stop farm. The farm’s website states some of the animals, after they recover, are adopted.
The equine rescue is licensed by the state to provide a safe haven and rehabilitation for abandoned, starved, neglected or abused horses. The facility is run by Pomeroy, who retired nearly four years ago from her career as an emergency medical technician, and her sister Nonie Jenkins, a physical education teacher at James Doughty Middle School in Bangor.
The sisters who run the rescue recently took in two of the three horses that escaped the Bangor barn in early September, Bertha, 24, and Comet, 15. The third horse, Hey Kaye, a 26-year-old mare, was adopted in November after the 87-year-old owner, a former harness racer and horse lover, admitted he could no longer take care of the animals.
The girls are using the fundraising project as a way to earn a bronze award, given to Scouts in fifth and sixth grade who “do good things for the world,” including “protect[ing] animals that can’t speak for themselves,” the Girl Scout website states.
“As soon as MacKenzie saw how the horses were treated kindly and heard some of the bad stories [about the conditions from which the animals were rescued] … she said, ‘Mom, I want to help her feed the horses,’” said Nicole Hanson, MacKenzie’s mother.
Two of the girls — Hanson and Byrne — want to be veterinarians when they grow up, Nicole Hanson said.