Daily Mail

A one-legged duck. A hen who needs physio. A partially-sighted porker.

All found sanctuary in Britain’s most wonderfull­y eccentric animal farm!

- By Lorraine Fisher

Di Slaney stands in her utility room squishing grape after grape into a bucket full of broken slices of bread.

Then she tips in lettuce bought by her husband alan on a daily supermarke­t dash to snap up reduced fruit and veg.

The utility room in her beautiful 400year- old stone farmhouse is piled with hundreds of packets of ginger biscuits, kilos of dried pasta, punnets of strawberri­es, bananas and sacks of animal feed.

less than a decade ago, Di and alan were both running businesses from their nottingham­shire village home.

now they’re also running an animal sanctuary that currently cares for more than 100 farmyard creatures. and not just any creatures. They take in the ones no one else wanted, rejected because they were disabled, had health problems, special needs or simply grew too old.

Or, in the case of the many rescued from petting zoos, simply because they grew up. ‘People imagine these animals are living a lovely life in the petting zoo until they die naturally,’ says Di, ‘but that’s not so in the majority of cases.

‘lambs can be bred out of season to be Christmas attraction­s to be bottle-fed by visitors but once they’ve grown out of the cute stage, they go into the food chain.’

What’s more, they often come to her emaciated, neglected and infested with parasites. Then the battle is on to save their lives. That battle costs Manor Farm Charitable Trust up to £100,000 a year — around a fifth of which are vets’ bills.

‘Our vets are constantly challenged by the ageing of our animals,’ Di admits.

no wonder — it’s rare farmyard creatures live more than a year or two before going to be slaughtere­d.

But it’s not just the vets who have been learning. Di has too. ‘in 2010 i treated myself to four hens as a reward for completing an Ma in creative writing and i found it was a slippery slope ,’ she says.

Ayear later, a relative died, leaving her money to buy the six- acre field behind the house. Slowly the brood grew and the dozen or so enclosures now house 64 hens, 27 goats, two donkeys, one pony, two pigs and 30 sheep.

Di now employs a full-time member of staff and three part-timers. every day begins at 6am when she gets the feed ready. it ends at 10.30pm — earlier in winter — when she puts the animals to bed. She also finds time to run her publishing business (and alan his marketing consultanc­y firm) which help bankroll Manor Farm.

Other money comes from corporate and personal donations and the sale of eggs and wool from the animals online. apart from cash worries, there are other downsides. ‘i’ve had every injury known to man — i’ve lost a nail to a goat horn, been electrocut­ed by a fence and accidental­ly injected myself with goat antibiotic­s,’ says Di.

But this pales into insignific­ance compared to the pain of losing one of their beloved creatures. The sanctuary is full so it’s only with the death of an animal that another can be saved. They come from farm parks, via social media or from other rescue centres.

‘it is hard work,’ says Di, ‘but when you see the sheep feeding on the grass and the goats happy in their enclosure, it’s worth it.’

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