Unwanted animals of all kinds are wanted at this Colorado woman’s home
Pigs, dogs, cats and even yaks are given a home at Tails of Two Cities Sanctuary. Meet Jess Osborne, the Coloradan behind this animal safe haven.
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NEDERLAND
At first, Stephanie Andelman couldn’t identify the two blobs wobbling down the road as she drove from her house in Gilpin County to Eldora ski area in early February.
Were they mountain lions, like the one that had attacked her husky a couple of years ago?
No, they were black.
Were they dogs themselves, busted out of a backyard fence?
That was probably it.
But as she drew nearer, she saw they were pigs. And that something was off.
She stopped the car and got out. They started shuffling toward her, attracted to the bright yellow flowers on her sky-blue ski pants. Another couple stopped and the three of them contemplated returning the pigs to a nearby yard it looked like they’d come from, and that would be that. But they were worryingly skinny, and Andelman surmised they’d gone on the lam in search of food and water.
One was significantly smaller than the other and so dehydrated its scrotum was sucked up into its body. The other was a little chunkier but by no means healthy pig size. Their coats were dull. Their tusks overgrown. Their snouts dry and cracked.
They needed help, so Andelman called her old neighbor Brigitte Johnson, who called her friend Jess Osborne, because Johnson is a passionate fosterer of dogs and Osborne does a whole other level of animal welfare.
A long, dramatic rescue ensued over the next few hours as Andelman, Johnson and Osborne attempted to herd the skittish animals into Andelman’s car and drive to the home they believed they’d come from. They talked to the owner, who no longer wanted the pigs and admitted he hadn’t been feeding them properly.
Andelman quickly scratched out an informal transfer of ownership on a piece of scrap paper. The owner signed it. And a little while later, they were off — the skinnier pig nestled on a pile of blankets in the back of Osborne’s car, where it had eaten Andelman’s salad and drank her water, and the slightly bigger pig in a trailer.
They were headed to Osborne’s house, which is so much more than a house, just off Magnolia Road between Boulder Canyon and Nederland. Her home is more than a home because in 2021 she and her husband, Myles, turned it into a full-fledged, 501(c)(3) registered animal sanctuary called Tails of Two Cities.
It sits on 23 acres with views of the Indian Peaks and a wide, sweeping meadow herds of elk park themselves in. And it’s just as good for Jess as it is for the menagerie of animals she’s rescued, including the pigs — plus goats, horses, a donkey, ducks, dogs, a cat and a yak named Talkeetna, after a town in Alaska.
“Love is the highest value”
A couple weeks after the pig rescue, Jess sat in the kitchen of Tails of Two Cities, which is also the kitchen in her house. Several dogs lounged on various beds or couches in the living room, a few goats bleated at the sliding glass door asking to come in, and Talkeetna, aka Tallie, stared through the window, strands of her thick coat of hair lifting in a chilly breeze that blew across the back deck.
As Jess ate cold lentil soup from the can, she jumped rapidly from topic to topic, a symptom of the ADHD that has plagued her since she was a child.
She grew up in Gunbarrel in the ‘80s and ‘90s. When she was around her pets — the African clawed frogs, the geckos; she had chickens once and always dogs — her sometimes-challenging symptoms were easier to handle. And ADHD imbued her with the superpower of extreme focus, “so even though I can’t remember history or make it through any of Myles’ books without falling asleep, when it comes to medicines and animal care and stuff like that, I go down the hyperfocusing tunnel,” she said.
As she got older, she continued feeling calm and happy around animals. To make a living, she did “everything under the sun,” including nannying children and caring for the elderly. Around 2015, while working at Sunrise of Boulder, an assisted living and memory care center, she asked if she could bring her rescue dogs, Dublin and Brisbane, with her. She first brought Dublin, who “was like a mediator. He gave out love to everyone. He was so tolerant and patient,” she said.
Not far into the telling of that story, Jess had to stop, because Brisbane was getting into a growling match with one of the formerly malnourished pigs, Berlin. “Brisbane is the boss of everyone,” Jess said, as she stood up to intervene. She also has anxiety. Jess had to watch them carefully, so nothing bad would happen. But the power struggle ended as quickly as it started, in part because Brisbane takes a small daily dose of human Prozac — prescribed by a vet — and partly because Jess steered her gently in another direction, saying, “It’s OK, Brisbane. You just have to give yourself some space. You have to walk away.”
Sitting back down and continuing with her story, she said when she didn’t bring the pups to Sunrise. “People wouldn’t recognize me, or they’d walk in and say, ‘Where are the dogs today?’”
The person she worked with the most, a centenarian named Peggy, loved the dogs so much she fed most of her snacks to them.
Those years amounted to a big “aha” moment for Jess.
“I had always dreamed of having an animal sanctuary because I love being with animals, but not everyone can have animals, especially the bigger ones,” she said. “So I thought wouldn’t it be great if we could save animals and create a place for unwanted animals, and then also make them accessible to people who don’t have the luxury to be with them. And I love kids. We’ve chosen not to have human kids, but I thought, what a great way to have kids around and do the elder care stuff.”
Soon she and the pups and a rescue cat named Louis were expanding beyond Sunrise into another memory care center. By then, she also had a rescue rabbit, so they never stayed away from home that long. And — this is important — Louis only went on visits if he wanted to. If he hid, Jess didn’t make him go.
Building a happy place for critters
By 2018, Jess had married Myles, a history professor at the University of Colorado, and the two were living in a house they owned on the outskirts of Boulder. They were also living with the rabbit, the cat, the dogs, and two miniature horses, Brooklyn and London, they’d adopted from a rescue. Jess’ elderly grandmother, whose memory was also failing, had moved in, too.
Jess said her grandmother “loved animals and kids, but she didn’t really love adults.” Jess saw the value of the animals being with her and how they helped her. She died in 2021, and that’s when Jess got serious about building a true animal sanctuary. It would be much bigger than the one they had informally started, and somewhere farther out of town, like in the foothills beyond Boulder.
They scored the house below Twin Sisters Peak on 23 acres off Magnolia Road for a price they could handle. The location was private enough but people could find it with clear directions. And the land was big enough for a bunch of animals to run around on. They’d build a fence, of course, and keep vigil for resident mountain lions, coyotes and, maybe someday, wolves.
We’ve chosen not to have human kids, but I thought, what a great way to have kids around and do the elder care stuff.
— Jess Osborne
But before Jess could continue telling this story, she had to deal with another interruption. Some of the goats donated to the sanctuary were standing on the deck, staring through the glass, bleating like crazy. “They see me walk by, and they just start screaming and crying,” she said. “They don’t cry tears like the pigs do, but they want a lot of attention.”
She opened the door, issued some pats, sat back down and continued.
The house was kind of junky when they moved in, which turned out to be perfect. Because no doubt they were going to let animals inside when they needed it. Like the ducks that, in February, Jess was envisioning moving from their current location to a bathroom so they could have access to a tub and water all night long. “And then the pigs could move to the room the ducks were in, because there’s a door to the outside and they are potty-trainable. But we need to do a little juggling because we don’t ever want the pigs and the dogs alone together. And Darwin, being Houdini, can open all the doors, so we’ll have to do a few things.”
“In an ideal world, we would have the house look more housey and with less stuff everywhere,” she said. But it really is all about the animals, so she tells the story of how some came to live there.
Some lucky beasts
There are the pigs, of course, who, after a visit to Colorado State University’s veterinary teaching hospital (a trip funded by donations Andelman raised for her birthday) are healthy again.
There are four dogs, including Darwin, a Great Pyrenees-Great Dane mix who had a severe overbite requiring seven surgeries last summer; biological brothers Ziggy and Wilbur, both with a disease that makes them wobble around like they’re drunk when they walk; and Brisbane, the Prozac queen.
Like Tallie, every animal at Tails of Two Cities is named after a place on the map, because Jess and Myles thought why not add the opportunity to teach kids some geography when they were meeting the crew? (See their full bios here.)
LEFT: Louis the cat eats chicken near a jar of oats and reminders to water the horses. RIGHT: Six goats, four dogs and a yak greet Osborne on her back deck. (Alyte Katilius, Special to The Colorado Sun)
Louis the cat is named after St. Louis, but they call him Louie. They got him from a neighbor’s daughter after she rescued him from euthanasia.
There are the several types of rescued horses, including the two miniatures; a quarter horse named Dream and a Hanoverian warmblood named Luna; a donkey named Murphy; and a sleek, black, 2,000-pound Percheron draft horse named Rio whom the Osbornes adopted after she was saved from a kill pen and who Jess says looks at her, when she’s “throwing an adult tantrum,” in a way that says, “Oh, good. You’re finally expressing outwardly what you’re feeling.”
Tallie inadvertently brought goats to Tails of Two Cities.
It was freezing the night she was born, nearly two years ago, at the edge of the meadow, where the Osbornes were letting Woody Woodward, a local rancher, graze his yaks.
She couldn’t stand, and Woodward thought she was crippled. It turned out she was only premature, but he didn’t think she would make it because he didn’t have the time to bottle feed her. So he asked Jess and Myles if they wanted to take the little brown yak calf, and within minutes they were the proud parents of Tallie.
But she was so tiny and weak she couldn’t eat. They wrapped her in a down jacket and put her on the heated seat of Jess’ car, and Jess called feed stores until she found one in Longmont that had cow colostrum. On her way there, she called the livestock vets at CSU, who told her to try giving Tallie corn syrup so she’d have more energy to suck the colostrum from a cow-calf bottle. She was fading, so Jess took her to CSU where the vets kept her overnight and gave her fluids, antibiotics and vitamins intravenously to keep her alive and boost her immune system. When she finally perked up, Jess took her home, tasked with feeding her round-the-clock. But she needed milk.
Enter some goats who lived a couple miles away. Yaks can digest goat milk, and theirs helped Tallie survive. Now she’s herded up with other goats from the same farm that were destined to die until a few kind citizens bought them and donated them to Tails of Two Cities.
Jess does what she can to keep the show running, and a lot of times it’s just her at the sanctuary while Myles is working.
In a world full of exclusion, the sanctuary is a place where everyone and anyone is included.
— Brigitte Johnson,
Osborn’s friend
Everyone’s always needing something and it can get exhausting.
They’re above 8,000 feet, where the weather can be extreme, so that can add to the challenge.
But Jess and Myles are happy they moved to their place outside the town of Nederland.
“I mean, I knew Ned was friendly, but we’ve just been absolutely floored about how the community has totally embraced us,” Jess said. Many residents volunteer on a regular basis. And there are people like Andelman and Johnson and Johnson’s friend Patti, who hooked them up with the goat farmer, Phylleri Ball.
Like all of the animals who end up with her and Myles, the goats from Ball’s farm lucked out.
“In a world full of exclusion, the sanctuary is a place where everyone and anyone is included,” Johnson said. “Love is the highest value. Special needs and abandoned animals are the VIPs. And Jess is an absolute Amazonian wild card who sleeps with the animals if she thinks they’ll be scared because of a storm. Both she and Myles have kind hearts and care for others — animals and humans.”
An ode to Dublin
Tails of Two Cities seemed destined to happen, but Dublin set its tone.
He died in 2023, after 12 wonderful years with the Osbornes, and it’s clear Jess will always love the Great Dane-lab mix she adopted from the Boulder Humane Society.
“Dublin was so great, I wish you could have met him,” she said, tearing up.
“He’s really what kind of inspired me to come up with a place of radical love and acceptance of all. Because every new animal, every new human, he just loved them to death. And so, when people ask how did you train the animals to all get along, I think a lot of that was Dublin. He was our first dog after (their other dog) Blaise and anytime a new animal came it was like, we all get along here. We all love each other and take care of each other.”
Johnson said Jess and Myles pay that love forward.
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All of the animals lucky enough to end up with them get “the best food, vitamin supplements and nighttime lullabies,” she said. “They live in a beautiful property with some of the best views in the area. They are Jess’ and Myles’ children and they are treated as such. And the transformations I’ve seen have been epic, especially in the pigs.”
Berlin and the other pig, Bolton, went from being “absolutely terrified and frantic for food to completely relaxed, rolling over for belly rubs and sunning themselves in the middle of the grass,” she continued. “They literally could not be touched when we rescued them — any movement elicited them biting and hoping it was food. Now they are just like happy dogs. You can pet them and scratch them and call them by name.”
But Tails of Two Cities is a very pricey enterprise that is currently 70% self-funded. That’s not sustainable, Jess said, so they’re always searching for more money.
They need it to keep taking members of the clan on visits to the elderly and to keep bringing kids’ grief groups to them.
They need it because they want to keep delivering Dublin’s ethic to people who might otherwise not get to experience the transforming love of animals, and because they believe that healing animals also helps humans.
