One of the long-term residents of the barn where I board my horse Ben was a palomino gelding named Apollo. Big, easygoing, used mostly for lessons, he belonged to the barn owner, Annette, who’d taken him and his late dam, Shadow, in payment for a board bill. He was king of the gelding paddock but not a bully about it.
I was riding Ben in the indoor ring Wednesday evening when Annette led Apollo in to wait for the vet. Apollo was crusted with mud and he was icy cold under the blanket he wore despite despite the relative balminess of the night. As Annette led him slowly around the arena, the others with her filled me in: He’d been fine during the day, but at closing they found him in a seizure, coated with mud from having been down for who knows how long. He was frightened, stumbling, smacked into the wall of his stall when they got him in it.
The vet arrived soon and examined Apollo. He found that the gelding was totally blind in his left eye and had only a little vision in the right. With the blanket off you could see how tucked up Apollo was – not at all his usual well-fed look. Diagnosis: A neurological catastrophe, quite possibly a stroke. The vet gave him Banamine and prednisone, to relieve the muscle spasms and pain and hopefully to reduce any inflammation affecting Apollo’s nervous system. He did say he’d seen some horses recover their sight over time from something like this, but offered no false hopes.
We tried to put Apollo back in his stall briefly, since the vet’s rectal examination had found a very full bladder and the horse would always urinate as soon as he went into his clean stall, but Apollo whacked into the door frame and, panicking, refused to try again. We tried putting him in Ben’s stall (Ben was by this time in his paddock for the night) and he made it in there but didn’t go. At least we could see that the Banamine was relieving some of his discomfort by then.
Annette, exhausted and distraught, decided to leave Apollo free in the ring overnight and make the decision on euthanasia in the morning. Getting someone in to take the body would have to wait until then in any case. We cleared the ring of anything Apollo might hurt himself on and I left.
I arrived the next morning to find that Apollo had died during the night. There were no signs that he’d struggled to get up from where he lay, so we can hope that it was fast. Annette found his body when she went out around 6 a.m. to feed breakfast. She’s doing okay, but it’s hit her hard, not least because she lost Shadow only a year ago.
Apollo was 18 years old and a good guy.
: to you and Annette.
We lost a very beloved lesson horse named Barney around this time last year. It was very sad for both the staff and students. I’m sure Apollo will be mssed by many.