STANWOOD – The horses at Kuitan Rescue have had rough lives. Abuse and neglect have brought them to this nonprofit horse rehabilitation farm, with the hope of offering them a more humane existence.
Dan Bates / The Herald
Recently, their plight attracted the attention of a group of employees of an Everett Home Depot store, who donated their time to fix the farm’s gate and fences.
Sharon Demuth, a store employee, said seeing the horses brought back memories of when she was a kid.
“All I could think of was this one horse I took care of,” she said. “It was a walking hat rack, just skin and bones.”
A little love went a long way.
“That horse followed me around like a little dog,” she said. “Nobody had ever taken care of him before.”
The old fence at Kuitan Rescue told a story of frustration. The horses had chewed and kicked it. The gate was a kicked-out mess that needed fixing.
“They chew on the fences, especially the ones that have been abused,” Demuth said.
“We go through fence boards constantly,” said Cheryl Arnold, Kuitan Rescue’s founder.
Demuth and several other employees and managers of the Home Depot at Highway 99 and 128th Street SW tapped into their company’s community service program to help. Using $250 in gift cards, they bought and donated the materials, then volunteered their time to replace the large two-door gate.
Dale Thomas used his experience running the store’s millwork department to design a much sturdier gate, with new wood, hinges, hanging cables and a latch. Store manager Michelle Rigott was there, running a power saw, as well as Romy Bernhard, an assistant store manager who helped Demuth organize the project.
The volunteers also painted and recycled some of the sturdier boards to patch up the more heavily chewed sections of fence.
Arnold appreciated their efforts.
“I know a gate sounds like a very small thing, but for us it’s a really big thing,” Arnold said.
The money that she would have had to spend to fix the gate and fence can now be spent on veterinarian bills, feed and other costs of caring for as many as 20 horses at a time.
“So the money that we do have could go where it truly belongs, which is for the kids – I call them kids,” Arnold said of the horses.
She helped start Kuitan Rescue seven years ago and now has about 250 volunteers, including 30 who donate significant amounts of their time.
The group sometimes has horses brought to the farm while legal disputes over charges of neglect are settled. Kuitan means horse in Chinook, the trade language used by local American Indian tribes when white settlers first came.
The Home Depot employees got involved at the suggestion of the head cashier, Shelley Griffin, a horse lover who has known Arnold for years.
Patti Reed, the store’s human resources manager, said Home Depot provides the gift cards four times each year as a way to encourage its employees to give back to the community. Bigger projects are handled at the corporate level with volunteers from multiple stores.
Demuth said employees are not pressed into service.
“There’s no real reward other than the fact that you know that you helped somebody out, which is more valuable, more precious than anything else you could actually do.”
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