Welcome to Spring Farm CARES
Spring Farm CARES is an Animal and Nature Sanctuary located in the scenic Mohawk Valley of Central New York. We are home to an average of 200 – 225 animals including horses, donkeys, goats, dogs, cats, rabbits, birds and poultry. We also have a Nature Sanctuary of over 250 acres of forest, wetland, and grassland with several miles of trails open by appointment and for tours. We are also home to Animal Communicator/Spiritual Intuitive Dawn Hayman.
You can browse the many aspects of the farm, including learning more about our animal residents and our programs, right here through our website. You are also always welcome to visit in person. We would love to show you around the farm and introduce you to the many wonderful animal residents. Visits and Tours can be scheduled by appointment so that we are sure to have someone available to show you around.
The Beginnings
Spring Farm has been in the family of co-founder Bonnie Jones Reynolds since 1820, and was operated as a dairy farm until 1980. In 1987 Bonnie and co-founder Dawn E. Hayman became TTouch Practitioners. In the course of their practice, people began to bring their unwanted animals to them. So that, in January of 1991, they incorporated as a not-for-profit animal sanctuary and began to take in animals in earnest. Our official name is Spring Farm Center Alternative Research Education Sanctuary, Inc.. Since that mouthful gives computers nervous breakdowns, we adopted the more user-friendly, and aptly descriptive, acronym Spring Farm CARES. Bonnie and Dawn were later joined by Dr. Margot Unkel in 1995. Bonnie, Dawn, and Margot work 24/7/365 in the daily operation of Spring Farm CARES.
The Spring Farm CARES Difference
When we formed the nonprofit corporation known as Spring Farm CARES, we were carrying forward the work of years, centered around TTouch, Centered Riding, Proper Balance Movement, acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic, and, ever more importantly, Interspecies Communication. We knew that we wished to shelter various “down on their luck” animals, to utilize and to study “alternative” ways of caring for, healing, and lovingly co-existing with animals, to educate the public as to these methods, and to share our findings with a readership.
While carrying out these goals, we became aware of what we have begun to call “The Spring Farm Difference”. Our visitors called it to our attention. “I love to come here. It’s so peaceful.” “There is such a FEEL to this place. So peaceful.” “Can I come here and meditate once in a while? It’s so peaceful.” “Can I just go in and groom a horse? I need the peace.”
Peace. That word is spoken by almost everyone who comes here. What makes it so peaceful? We’re no saints. We have good and bad days, problems and frustrations like anybody else, so WE weren’t making the difference – at least not alone. We knew the answer. But it was hard to accept — even frightening.
One variable at Spring Farm is the land itself. There is something powerful and beautiful here. But the main variable is the animals who have found their ways to us, coupled with the exceptional talent of Dawn Hayman. With her and through her all of us at Spring Farm talk with our animal friends. Not to. WITH. Our animals are full participants in the running of Spring Farm CARES. They are recognized as our teachers. Several among them are revered as MASTER TEACHERS, great spirits inhabiting animal bodies. When you walk into the animal facilities at Spring Farm, you are surrounded by HAPPY animals, respected companions and teachers – eager to talk and to share with those who enter.
Spring Farm is a public facility like no other. We are “selling” a commodity more desperately needed by humanity than all the money in the world. We are opening a gate back to an ancient understanding, to a peace and love and harmony which we believe initially existed between all species. Spring Farm is a place of miracles and magic, a place of spiritual power and awakenings. We are the fortunate facilitators, as much in awe of this magic as anyone else.
While still actively practicing holistic alternatives and handling, we see now that the area in which we can make the largest contribution is meant to revolve around our growing ability to communicate with our animals and to allow that communication and the wisdom of the animals who have found their ways to us to spread out and TEACH and to spiritually SOOTHE those who enter this place or who work and learn with us – to help return to their lives a paradise lost, a peace and understanding, trust and MAGIC which our civilization has robbed from them. Spring Farm is primitive – in the true sense of the word. “Of or belonging to the first state, stage, original.” We are ancient here at Spring Farm. And our world desperately needs to become old – and one – again.
In the beginning, All That Is could communicate freely and joyously with each of its own parts. Most of those parts do still freely and joyously communicate – animal, plant, mineral, and elements. Only humankind has dropped out of the network, assuming itself apart, better than all the rest, the only part capable of “real” communication. And like squirrels in a tread-wheel we run faster and faster in our own little prison, rapidly going further to nowhere. Spring Farm is opening a gate back to the joyous, free, open-ended communication and wisdom enjoyed by the “dumb” parts of All That Is that we have been taught to scorn.
The entire concept of Spring Farm CARES is unique – NOTHING else like it ANYWHERE – certainly unlike any other charity or nonprofit organization. We can’t be regimented, bottled, or reduced to a formula. We aren’t selling services or tours or swimming lessons or salvation or reform. We aren’t do-gooders, we try never to pass judgment on others, being so very imperfect ourselves. We feel that we can reach more people, effect more change, by simply being what we are here, welcoming visitors, and letting people know what we live and learn here each day.
Animal communication has become what we do here on a daily basis – the GIFT that we can give. Because this is an idea whose time has come! Again. And it is about time. Now into the new millennium, the most hardened skeptic, deep down, is hungry to get off that tread-wheel and remember ancient gifts, abilities, riches – peace. People come here, take workshops, or have consultations with Dawn and throw their skepticism away. We gather wastebaskets filled with discarded skepticism each day. We don’t intend to recycle.