‘Around here, it’s all about the animals’

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Published on Wednesday, July 27, 2016

Photo by Kira Paterson. Don Winthrop with his baby goats.

By Kira Paterson

Neepawa Banner/Neepawa Press

When it comes to good stories, Don Winthrop has an abundance to share that will warm anyone’s heart. Winthrop runs a small animal farm that he takes to community events as a children’s attraction and he sees new reactions every time.

Winthrop lives on an acreage near the old Arden Ridge service station on Highway 16. There, he has quite a number of farm animals of all different shapes and sizes. “I guess we have about 13 different kinds of animals here,” he estimated. That number includes horses, cows, pigs, alpacas, goats, sheep, chickens, ducks, peacocks and much more. There are also many different breeds of some of the animals.

When asked about how many animals in total he owns, he replied, “For the sake of what I’m supposed to have here, I’d say way too many.” He estimated that he has about 30 different animals that he takes to events.

Winthrop didn’t always have the collection of critters that he boasts now. “I was originally born and raised in Kelwood,” he said. “We had horses when I was living in Kelwood. Until I left home, we always had horses – that was ‘57 I guess. We had horses for everything we did.”

He continued, “Then I was in Alberta for about 15 years... and I worked out on the ranches when I was in Alberta. I’ve just always loved animals. It’s kind of a passion. I never expected anything like this [farm].”

In 1972, he came back to Manitoba and worked in McCreary at a grain elevator for 11 years. “Then I was in Oakburn for about 10 [years],” he added. It was around 2002 when he retired and moved into his current, Arden-area home with two horses. “It wasn’t until, I guess it’d be about 2008, we started going to the horse sales and picking up... horses nobody seemed to want,” he said. That’s when Winthrop started his “ongoing accumulation” of animals.

The first animal he saved was a small horse that was going to be sold for meat. “The owners didn’t care what happened to it,” he explained, so he took the horse and has had it ever since. Then, friends and neighbours started hearing that he saves animals, so when they can no longer keep an animal, they’ll contact him to see if he’ll take it.

“You just never know [what animal will come next]. I got a phone call the other day, they said ‘We’ve got some ducks, do you need some ducks?’ So we got 15 ducks. That’s just the way life is,” he stated.  “The more small animal farms we went to, the more animals we acquired. There was a couple up Mountain Road, they wanted to get rid of those two alpacas, they were moving to Alberta. So we got a phone call... we were out the next day and picked them up.”

‘You should bring your animals’

At first, the animals were just for him and his wife Shirley’s pleasure. They didn’t even think of doing a kids’ attraction at fairs and rodeos. “Then we started with the petting zoo, small animal farm is how we refer to it now, just because the legalities... Some friends were out at the Minnedosa Rodeo and we went up to the rodeo and they had a horse there and kids were riding it around and they had a little calf. And [my friend] said, ‘You know, you should bring some of your sheep and your little horses,’ and I think I had a cow at that time. He said, ‘You should bring some of your animals, we’ve got a trailer we can hook up and bring them’. That was the beginning of it all.”

After their first petting zoo, they started doing more and more each year. “We started off with one, and then we went to three,” Winthrop started, “[Now, in one year,] we go to McCreary three times, Neepawa twice, Gladstone, Minnedosa, Kelwood, Arden, Ste. Rose twice.”

The money is not what Winthrop is after with his small animal farm. “With the petting zoos... last year we did about 10 petting zoos and I did the math and it works out to I’m getting paid about 50 cents an hour... We try to cover our cost of moving the animals around. And the kids’ satisfaction is the greatest, it’s always different with different kids.”

‘It’s goofy little things’

These small animal farm outings are where Winthrop gets many of his little stories. “Every petting zoo seems to be the same. It’s goofy little things. Like in Neepawa last year at the fair... one of our miniature pigs, Penny, she was in the first pen and this big guy walks in and he’s carrying this little boy and he says, ‘Look at the pig!’ and this little blonde headed girl looks up at him and says, ‘That’s not a pig, that’s Penny!’ Like, how do you beat it? It’s just little things like that at every one that makes it all worthwhile.”

Shirley added, “That little girl in Arden, she was leaving for her chemotherapy treatment. And the little stallion reached through the bars and kissed her on the face and he was a week old. You’d almost think that the horse knew that little girl needed something before she left... They understand.”

She continued, “When we take the animals out, there’s always one little girl that arrives that [Punch, one of the alpacas] falls in love with and he’ll get down on his knees and he’ll go through the bars and get as close as he can to that child. It’s love at first sight. And they get that glazed look in their eye, exactly the same as a human being and it’s just precious to watch. Because if we’re in a building, as soon as she comes through the door, Punch is already down. If we’re outside, she can be from here to where you parked your car and he’ll never take his eyes off that child.”

“It’s [for] the kids,” said Winthrop. “And the old people,” his wife added. Winthrop continued, “We were in McCreary two years ago... And we had an old donkey... she was going through a hard time because I think a cougar had got in and mangled up her mate, so he passed away and then she mourned something horrible. And she was in depression and when we took her to McCreary, there was this elder lady, I think 94, and she came over and she just hung on that donkey’s neck and the two of them stood there for almost, I’ll bet you, three quarters of an hour, and that old donkey just had her head laying on her and she was hugging it. You know, you can’t see it. It’s a feeling that just makes your heart want to do it again.”

‘Education is the biggest part’

Besides the touching ones, lot of reactions are pretty funny. Winthrop recently got a Highland calf and had it at the Neepawa Canada Day celebrations. Highland cows are very hairy, almost like sheep; they look quite different from most cows that are seen here. He said it was entertaining to watch the kids try to guess what kind of an animal it was. “It’s so funny to listen to the people when they were looking at him... ‘Well what is he, is he a sheep? Is it a goat? Is it really a bear?’ Because we called him Teddy Bear, because he’s big and white. ‘No, it’s a big dog!’ I guess that’s the sole purpose of it, because every day you find out that people are out of tune with animals, with farming in particular. And I guess... that’s the story of why I wanted to try and get people back to, this is your food supply, this is how life is in rural and it feeds millions of people around the world.... These are the kinds of animals that it happens with,” he said. “Education is the biggest part of it.”  

“I guess, when I retired, it was always a part of my thought to do something for the kids because, after 20 years in the elevator system, I was beginning to find out that nobody outside the farming industry gave two hoots about the farming industry. And I thought this is kind of my way of getting parents out and getting kids out and showing them, this is an animal. This is not a 9-5 job, it’s a full time job. And these are the results, you can walk out every day and appreciate them,” he explained. “We’re not going to change anything in the world... but every time we do [a petting zoo] there’s at least one little kid that gets a little more information out of it.”

‘They got me through the hard times’

For Winthrop, bringing people pleasure and education through his animals is only half of the reason he does what he does. The other half is his love for the animals themselves. “They’re nice to have around. You come out every morning and they’re always glad to see you. It doesn’t matter whether you feel like doing anything. They actually brought me over a real hard part of my life. When I basically retired, I had a bit of a nervous breakdown. I just didn’t want to do anything and then when we bought this place, I had a couple of horses at that point and it was the reason I had to get up every morning... They got me through the hard times and now I just love them all,” he explained. “I think I’d call them my healers, actually, they just make everything worthwhile. And knowing the enjoyment of everyone that comes here and every place we go... you can’t put a price on it.”

He and Shirley treat all of their animals like family.  “Around here, it’s all about the animals. The animals come first. There isn’t many that aren’t spoiled,” Winthrop said.

“Everything here is a pet. I had one sow here, I had raised her and she was probably about eight or nine years old, probably about 1,200 pounds. We went to a sale one day, and... we came home from the auction and... I guess she’d had a stroke... I went over to her and she couldn’t move. I didn’t have the heart to put her out of her misery, so I was going to get a guy to come. By the time I went back out after I had phoned him, she had died. Basically, she had waited for us to come home, I think,” he said.

“Just memories and little stories that they all tell, like Shirley, she goes out to feed the pigs and they won’t let her feed them. And I say, ‘Well what’s the matter?’ [she replies] ‘I didn’t give them a hug before I fed them,’” he chuckled. “All the stupid things that happen around here... we have an old rooster here and we used to have an old ewe... and one day, I called the ewes up [to eat], and they all come up except this one big momma ewe, and so I called her up, finally up she comes and she’s got this rooster on her back.”

“I guess what makes it I think the most interesting is when the babies are born, to see what we’ve created. Like, we’ve got mini pigs coming now, that’s going to be the first mini pigs [we have]... And the little goats this year, that’s the first time I’ve ever had baby goats – well it’s the first time I’ve ever had goats to start with – then we had 10 little ones this year and they’ve been just a bundle of joy,” he remarked.

“And it’s the joy that everybody else gets out of seeing the animals,” Shirley added. “When someone says, ‘Oh, I enjoyed your animals,’ well that makes us feel good, because we enjoy them 24/7.”

“Everybody says ‘What do you do with all the animals?’ I say, ‘Feed them.’ They say, ‘Well don’t you sell anything?’ Well no, not really,” Winthrop said. “They live their life here, they bring us enjoyment, that’s all we ask of them. We won’t make any money off of them.”

“It isn’t for everybody, but it’s for me,” he concluded.

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