Our animals

We bought a heavy horse, to move timber within the woodland and avoid the unnecessary use of our tractor and other heavy machinery

We found that the visiting children, and especially the special needs children, love her BUT she's massive, and although she has a lovely nature some of our visitors find her a bit intimidating.

So along came Jade, from an animal sanctuary. Much smaller and very popular with our visitors

And now we have other animals too; there are the hens, there were originally about 20 we think, donated from various sources.
But the original 20 or so have bred... and bred... so now we have quite a lot of them! Most are ex battery hens, in theory they all live in a compound,

where they're fairly secure from our resident foxes, and of course they have a hen house for shelter. But some of our hens just can't believe their freedom and they prefer to roost in the trees, visiting the compound for food or when they feel like it

And then there are the sheep. Again, they have their own compound and they have plenty of 'wander space' too.

Each of these animals have brought enormous benefits to the Woodland Project, apart from the obvious benefits to the animals themselves who, barring accidents will have happy lives and will die of old age.
Many of our visitors have problems forming relationships with people and their contact with animals is helping them to see the value of caring for other creatures. Several of the animals have become very trusting, some of the hens have had to be hand-reared and many of them will allow themselves to be picked up and, as you can see, some of the animals really enjoy human attention!