内容摘要：Her horses are together in the shelter, while the dogs and cats are staying in the horse trailer. Her donkey, though, was feeling down in a stall by himself.

Her horses are together in the shelter, while the dogs and cats are staying in the horse trailer. Her donkey, though, was feeling down in a stall by himself.

When Meredith McKenzie got a notice days before of the heightened fire risk, she asked people at her barn to help evacuate her horse so she could focus on caring for her sister who has Alzheimer’s.“Horse people are not stupid about if there’s fire coming. We’re out before it starts because once that smoke happens, the horses go nuts and go crazy,” McKenzie said. “It’s very hard to corral them because they just want to run.”

The ranch where she kept her horses, the historic Bob Williams Ranch on Cheney Trail, burned, she said. McKenzie lost her equipment but another ranch has said they’ll give her a saddle and bridle.Suzanne Cassel evacuated Tuesday from Topanga with her two horses, a donkey named Oscar Nelson, four dogs and two cats. They rushed to nab a spot at a large animal emergency shelter at Pierce College, a community college in Woodlands Hills.Her horses are together in the shelter, while the dogs and cats are staying in the horse trailer. Her donkey, though, was feeling down in a stall by himself.

“He’s lonely, so I just went inside and sat in the stall with him for half an hour, and he liked that because nobody likes to be alone when you’re a herd animal,” she said.Buturovic, who runs the dog rescue shelter, took some of her canines to Harvilicz’s old hospital and others to a friend’s home in Venice.

By the time she returned to the Topanga ranch Wednesday morning, it had burned. The cement building that withstood two or three other fires since the 1950’s was covered in soot, its roof gone and windows blown out. Her ponies disappeared, along with two semi-feral dogs she fed. She’s hoping to raise money to support Philozoia, her non-profit organization that rescues animals from high-kill shelters.

“I don’t know where we’re going to go from here,” she said.Andrews started physical therapy and returned six months later about 30 pounds lighter and “running down the hallway almost,” Riella recalled. “He was just, you know, a different person,” so they started checking if he’d qualify for the pilot study.

One big question was cardiac fitness: Mass General’shad underlying heart disease that killed him. But Riella said intense exams showed Andrews’ “heart was in the best shape possible.”

Still, Andrews was a little nervous and sought advice from the only other person who knew what a pig kidney transplant was like — the NYU patient, Towana Looney.“We just prayed together and talked about how it would be,” Andrews said of their phone calls before and after his transplant. He said Looney advised “to just stay strong and that’s what I’m doing.”