HEALING HORSES
The heart and soul of exhilarating rodeo series is equine rescue
SANTA ANA PUEBLO — Connie Collis has been around horses all of her 55 years, but that doesn’t keep her from getting choked up when she talks about Sugar — her first pony as a girl growing up in Albuquerque’s South Valley.
Collis is the organizer of the Summer Rodeo Series, held every Thursday from mid-June to mid-August, at The Stables at Tamaya at the Hyatt Regency Tamaya Resort & Spa.
More than 50 people gathered Thursday evening, from youngsters to seniors, and cheered on cowboys lassoing steers, riders galloping in tight circles around barrels — and the kids who got in on the action, racing stick horses.
The rodeo is not just entertainment and serves a bigger purpose, as a fundraiser for Collis’ heart and soul: the Tamaya Horse Rehabilitation Program.
“It’s a beautiful program,” said Collis, the director and founder of the program that currently has 51 rescued horses.
“Each one of them is an individual, just like people,” she said. “They all have different problems and they all have different ways of healing from the problems.”
The aim of the program is to help the horses heal from the different effects of neglect, abuse or disinterest into “sweet, loving animals” to be adopted, if possible,
by people who will take good care of them.
“They are here until the perfect find,” she said.
Collis, who runs the Tamaya riding program, while also taking care of rescues at both the Tamaya stables and her property in the Jemez, said she couldn’t do it without the 40 or so volunteers who come and go.
“They’re the same as the horses, they kind of filter in and out,” she said, while others, like retired Marine Colonel Ben Braden, have stuck around since the beginning.
“Connie rescued me, and the horses at the same time,” Braden said, adding that working with the horses has helped him decompress from the leftover stresses of the military.
Braden, who served for 39 years from the Vietnam conflict until more recently in the Middle East, said the horses help him just as much as he helps them.
“It’s a therapy for me,” he said. “It’s good to see them come back, to be a healthy horse and act like a horse again.”
Braden called the rodeos the “fun part” of his work that raises money for the program, while allowing them to “show off” some of the rescues.
“I truly love them all,” he said. “I always say I have a favorite one until the next one comes.”
During the rodeo, Braden rode a rescue named “Uncle Sam” that Collis gave to him for his 61st birthday.
“I like the horses that nobody else likes,” he said. “Because I can relate — it’s easy for me to go out there and say, ‘Hey, let’s work this out together.’”
Since the Tamaya program’s founding, Collis, Braden and the other volunteers, have helped around 100 horses, all with different results — some were adopted, others were too sick to make it, while some lived out their lives in program.
Collis said the best part of her job is getting to love on the horses and she always gets attached.
“Seeing the horse get better, it just makes my heart happy,” she said. “They are just wonderful that way.”
Collis, who was rescuing horses long before the program began, credits the Hyatt and Tamaya with making it all possible.
“It really is a great partnership,” she said, adding that eventually she would like to have a bigger facility of her own for the program.
“That’s my dream, to have a piece of land where I can take care of the horses and the old ones can live out their lives in freedom,” she said. “It would be nice if I knew that, no matter what happened, I would always have a place for them.”