Still shaking when I think about it

This evening sheer luck led me to save a horse’s life.

Sheer luck, that I decided to go to the barn to give my horse Ben his late hay and turn him out for the night around 7:00, when the sun was still setting and the light was good, rather than waiting another hour.

Sheer luck (or was it his already piqued curiosity?), that as I was trying to put Ben’s midweight turnout rug on him, he circled over to the open window in the back wall of his stall, looked out, spooked back, looked out again, spooked back again, so that I was led in my turn to look out.

Sheer luck that, not seeing directly ahead of me the deer I expected in the grassy weedy wasteland of an abandoned garden out there, I glanced to the right.

And saw a horse at the far edge of the former garden, on its back in a hollow, its hindquarters toward me, its legs in the air.

Not moving.

Then it stirred, it lifted its head and looked toward me, and I realized it was alive! I bolted out of Ben’s stall (yes, latching the door), ran to the house to get the barn owner, Annette, blurted out what I’d seen, and raced back with her. We grabbed a couple of leadropes from the shedrow as we hustled through it, out back and down to where the bay lay helpless, her blanket straps cruelly tight from her struggles.

We managed to wrench the straps undone. Beijing (a mare who, we discovered later, had most likely been sprung from her stall by the horse next to her fiddling with the stall latch) tried to roll over but couldn’t. She was at an angle that lifted all of her feet away from anything to push against.

I flipped a leadrope around her upper foreleg, snugged it close to her elbow, and began to pull. Annette grabbed her lower foreleg at the knee and lifted. Beijing heaved, twisted, and made it over! With her hooves at last on the ground she scrambled to her feet and trotted back to the barn, entering the open doorway of the indoor arena. We followed her, closed the gate, checked her over for injuries, made sure she was moving easily, and left her with hay and water to spend the night there, free to move about and hopefully not stiffen up.

Damn! Where she was lying when I spotted her was well away from where anyone normally goes, even in the daytime. In the dark, Annette on her bedcheck rounds later would never have seen her. Beijing was lying on sodden weeds. The temperature was in the 40s and forecast to fall into the 30s. If she’d been there all night, I believe she would have died of hypothermia and the great difficulty in breathing created by lying in that position for any length of time.

Beijing, through it all, stayed amazingly calm. She didn’t thrash as we tried to help her, was unfazed when we tended to her in the ring, and happily set to on the hay Annette gave her. Was that faith that the humans would make it right that I saw in her big brown eyes as she watched us work on her?

Sheer luck, a chain of lucky happenstance, saved Beijing. I still shake when I think of what could have been.

Ouch! Poor Beijing.

Happy ending!! So glad you were there to make a difference.

If I may request an installment of Horses for Dummies: How did she get like that, so that she couldn’t get up? (If only they made Life-Alert for horses!)

Glad she’s OK.

Once she was out of her stall, Beijing would have headed for the nearest source of FOOD. Horses have a few things always uppermost in their minds, and FOOD is at or near the top. Even though she’d just had her evening feed of grain and hay, she’d go wandering, looking for any FOOD that might be lying around waiting to be eaten.

Heading down the slight slope into the ex-garden would be natural since, popping out among the weeds of last fall, fresh shoots of this spring’s grass are poking up their luscious green tips. Um, excuse me, that would be GRASS!!!. The most advanced, yummiest shoots of GRASS!!! are at the far edge of the ex-garden, where the land gets hummocky and drops off toward the wetlands beyond.

I can see two ways Beijing might have turned turtle. One, she stumbled over some obstruction lurking in the weeds, fell, and rolled into the hollow. Two, and I think more likely, she was overcome with a sudden burst of spring shedding itch and lay down for a soothing itch-scratching roll, went over into the hollow, and discovered she couldn’t roll back.

Update: Beijing was fine when I got to the barn late this morning. Phew!

I love these hero stories… good for you!

There are angels all around us…it was your turn to be one this time. Good on you, ETF!!

Thanks.

One reason this hit me so hard: My wonderful old horse Nick, who died last September at age 23, had to be put down after a pasture accident injured his spinal column too severely to save him. He was found out in the field on his feet, battered and bruised from what must have been a terrible struggle to escape being cast in a hollow at the foot of a slope.

It was my friend who owns the farm where he was spending the summer who found him, and showed me when I got there the torn-up ground where Nick had been trapped for who knows how long. I didn’t see him cast – though I was with Nick when the vet released his spirit from the crippled flesh.

During Beijing’s rescue I was too busy for thoughts of Nick to intrude, but afterwards… Yeh. It’s always horrifying for a hrose lover to see an equine in such peril, but for me it was a helluva double whammy.

Good on you, mate. standing ovation of one

You discovered an equine to be supine with a sore spine.

The horse’s heft made you be deft with the rope that was left.

With added help she gave a yelp, and now she is just fine.

Fractured poetry? Sure, but at least the mare’s okay. How wonderful, and I salute your exceptional eye and instinct.

Cartooniverse

Thanks, but “hero” is too strong. It was luck: that my horse alerted me, that I was able to see what he was upset about, that I knew – thanks in part to an article a while back in EQUUS magazine – exactly how to deal with a cast horse, safely for both horse and human*; that Beijing stayed calm and didn’t make it much more difficult by thrashing.

Anyone else at my barn would have done the same, or at least run for help.

  • One of the article’s pointers, especially when rescuing in a stall, was: As the horse begins to get to its feet, RUN. Get out of the stall, out of its way, don’t try to haul it up, let it scramble to its feet and and stay out of range of flying hooves.