Keep our animals warm after our home flooded

We have a smallholding in Retford and moved here 5 years ago to give our rescue animals more space and freedom. We have taken in pigs, sheep, horses, chickens, small animals, cats and dogs and given them a second chance when no one else could.

4 years ago, our entire land and home flooded which left all of our animals in a desperate situation as we had nowhere dry for them all. Thankfully, hundreds of people helped us and were so incredible generous with their offers of help. We were so grateful for this and even wrote a book called "In need of Noah's Ark" to tell our story and to thank all of those that helped us.

Since the flood 4 years ago the environment agency promised to install measures to prevent this from happening again but unfortunately this does not seem to be the case for us. They managed to save a large number of houses from flooding near our smallholding which is great, but sadly our home was not one of them.

Thankfully, this time we had some amazing friends and farmer neighbours who waded through waist-deep water to get our pigs, sheep and horses to safety and for that we will be forever grateful.

However, our home is a state (to put it mildly). We put everything important up high but having to keep all of our dogs and cats upstairs was far from ideal. We have had take the dogs out to toilet multiple times a day which meant wading through deep, contaminated and very cold flood water multiple times a day. This means that after every "toilet trip" the dogs would go back upstairs to try and get warm and dry which has left everything drenched and filthy. Our cats enjoy the freedom of being able to come and go as they please through the cat flap so they were not impressed with being shut upstairs! We thought we had a good stock of towels and blankets but these ran out fast! And as our boiler and washing machine has now stopped working we have no way to clean and dry everything. We're stuck, again, and I have had a few people ask if they can help in any way and some have asked if we have a go fund me page, like a family member set up for us last time.

We don't want or like to ask for help but in case anyone would like to, we decided to create this page. We know that there are so many others out there who were affected by these floods and we feel for them greatly.

If anyone would like to donate towards our ridiculously high costs to get our house back to relative normality for the animals and help us get lots of towels, blankets, hay, straw and bedding for them all, we would appreciate it so so much. We managed to salvage most of the animal feed this time but of course we only had limited space up high for everything and our huge round bales of hay and straw are completely soaked through. No matter how small you think your donation is, every penny really does help in situations like this.

We also have a PayPal account which was set up around 5 years ago for our sanctuary Arco's Ark, so donations can still be made through this too: [email redacted].uk

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Michael, Carly & all the animals