Tall Ears and Short Tales : Observations from the Barn

When Carol Chapman sold her home in Connecticut, she soon found herself on one of those roads less traveled and that has made all the difference. Arriving in Texas, she bought a ranch and created The Last Refuge, a sanctuary for unwanted dogs, cats, goats, and, most of all, for horses, mules, and donkeys that were destined for the slaughterhouse.Meet Chipper, a chocolate Lab who not only participates in nursing horses back to health, but has also raised cats, lambs, and baby chicks. Learn how goats secretly yearn for the mountains of their ancestors and happily leap onto the hood of a car to illustrate that point. Follow Chapman around for a day and discover that it's hard to get out of shape when caring for horses-if lugging what has to go in one end (massive buckets of water, sixty-pound bales of hay, and fifty-pound bags of grain) doesn't keep a waistline trim, shoveling up piles of what comes out the other end will.Grab a cup of coffee, pull up a hay bale, and enjoy Chapman's unconventional collection of earthy, hilarious, but always heart-warming and timeless reminiscences.

With humor and a deep sense of wonder, the stories in this book introduce the depths of interaction between an eclectic cast of animals and the woman who cares so deeply about them.

Tall Ears and Short Tales invites the reader to pull up a bale of hay, grab a cookie, pour a cup of coffee, sit and relax to stories framed as barn chats. In her stories, Chapman focuses on the bond between humans and animals, gently stressing that animals are not objects over which humans have dominion, but are kindred souls on a mutual passage through our life experiences. She invites readers to watch donkeys playing hide and seek, dogs stealing carrots, and an elderly horse caring for a blind horse. Chapman vividly enables us to feel the emotions that animals share with us and to recognize the beauty within all animals that can change our own lives.