Happy Easter from me and my Easter pony, Sparky. He is enjoying a themed party just for him for no reason other than it’s fun. He is (at least) 33 years old. I have no idea if this is his first Easter party. As a pony, he’s likely had many homes in his life. Ponies are frequently bought, enjoyed for a year or so, then sold… but I have had him since 2010 and he won’t ever go anywhere again.
Ponies tend to have a bit of a ‘oh, yeah, I already did that back in 1999’ kind of attitude to life and consequently he did take it all in his stride. Still, it was beautiful to watch and his eyes did widen with delight many times, which filled my heart with joy.
Wishing you and yours a peaceful and gentle Easter weekend.
My big boy, Lincoln, was sick this week and it shook me, for two reasons.
Firstly, when I accidentally bought him at auction, he’d endured long-term starvation. He didn’t look like he does now. He even had fluid sacs around his abdomen, which is (in short terms), very bad. But, he survived. His mane (which had mostly fallen out, or been chewed off by fellow starving horse friends), grew back, thick long, and soft. What remained of his coat (small, gingerish-brown, twists of brittle nothing) fell out, and he surprised me with a gleaming, jet-black summer coat. He ate… and ate… and ate… and in just seven weeks, he had transformed (physically, anyway… his mental and emotional scars took a bit longer). But, I guess, I always think of him as a survivor. Tough as nails.
Secondly, after that initial rehab, he has had precisely ZERO problems. 14 years of complete stability. He’s not needed a vet for anything other than routine annual dental work and Hendra vaccines. I’ve often thought that Lincoln must have used up all his suffering and bad luck/karma in the first 8-ish years of his life and it would be easy sailing for him now. True, two years ago, he lost Tansy (the love of his life) and I’ve never felt that he’s ever completely bounced back. But on the whole, he’s had a charmed life with me since that fateful day I accidentally brought him into our lives.
Over the weekend, though, he stopped eating, and I’m pretty sure my own heart stopped for a moment too. There’s not much sadder then a horse that won’t eat! And, it’s dangerous. As grazers, they need a pretty constant rate of food going through that enormously long intestinal tract, and things can flip from ‘okay’ to ‘life threatening emergency’ pretty quickly. (Horses really aren’t for the faint-hearted.) He wasn’t showing any signs of colic. (That was good.) But he wouldn’t eat. (That’s bad.) Still, he looked stable, it was late, and I checked on him overnight – still no colic. In the morning, he was the same. I took his temperature and he was running a fever over 39 degrees. (Not good.) Anytime I’ve had a horse that’s off its food and running a fever, it has either turned to colic or it turned out to be pneumonia. So, I called the vet. (It was a Sunday, of course, because you can set your watch on it that if a horse is going to get sick or injured it will happen after hours.) It was not colic, nor pneumonia, nor laminitis and nothing else that could be seen. On-the-spot blood test (in the back of the vet’s truck) showed he had quite high levels of inflammation, but that was all we got.
The short end to this story is that he got IV painkillers and started eating about ten minutes later. I kept him on painkillers for a few days and he’s been fine since. The bloods were sent off for more thorough analysis but other than one random anomaly, there was nothing to go on. I’d had him tested for Cushings only a few months ago (I now do this will all older horses after the mammoth week-long colic nightmare I had with Yum Yum six months ago) and it was negative. His vaccinations are up to date. There are no horses on our boundaries. None of my other horses are ill. The whole thing is a mystery.
And it’s shaken me. I’m an emotional wobble board most of the time and excessively so if something is wrong with any of my animals. But with Lincoln, I have a bonus layer of panic thrown in. I think, having had a glimpse of how much he suffered prior to coming to me, his clearly unusual background (that’s another story but suffice to say, Lincoln is ‘different’) and the rather odd way he came into my life, has made me extra protective of him. He was clearly ‘meant’ for me. I never want him to suffer ever again. He went through too much before he got to me. Plus, he’s rather hilarious, a huge personality, and very cuddly, all of which makes him a favourite with everyone who meets him.
This unexpected and mysterious illness makes me realise that he’s not my 8-year-old boy anymore. He’s 22… we’ve turned a corner, and the clock is counting down.
[Image ID] A wide shot of a black horse standing behind a half wall in a garage-turned-stable. He is turned towards the camera, waiting for food. His eye isn’t entirely relaxed. Something is bothering him.
This is Tansy with me moments after winning her at auction at the Gympie sale yards in 2011. I went head-to-head with ‘the dogger’ (slaughter man), who was very keen to win her as Thoroughbreds have a high level of muscle tone and therefore get the doggers more money by weight at slaughter. My husband stood beside me. ‘Again, again,’ he kept saying, his eye firmly on the dogger. There were hundreds of horses there that day; we couldn’t take them all. But she was lucky. She got us; and we got her.
Every year, I like to share her story. You can see by Tansy’s face just how defeated she was that day. She was dripping in sweat, having been standing in this yard for many, many hours, with barely a drop of putrid water for relief. We had no idea how long it had been since she’d eaten.
Tansy doesn’t particularly like people but, bless her, she is one of my most well-mannered horses. Her training was good but the racing system broke her.
She is a thin horse because she has now lost all her front top teeth so can’t graze well. She lost her teeth due to neglect. The racing industry is there to make money, not to love and care for horses. If they can get away with not spending some money on dentistry they will do it. Now, I can fatten her up if I hard feed her twice a day but it’s really not good for her gut so we walk a fine line of watching her weight slide down, then up again as I put more hard feed into her, then stabilise, then slide again.
Last year, I thought we’d have to euthanise her. Her off-fore fetlock had ‘blown up’ a couple of times since I’ve had her, but then it blew up and stayed that way and she was terribly lame. X-rays revealed an old fracture–a racing injury for certain, according to the vet. He said she would have been stabled for a while to see if it would come good, then when it didn’t they would have tried to breed from her, and then she would have been discarded to slaughter.
This is the reality of racing. This is the story I saw over and over again as I literally pulled horses out of slaughter yards in my three years running a horse rescue charity.
As it turned out, a cortisone injection helped her fetlock through the worst of the pain and now the joint has fused she is more comfortable.
I don’t blame Tansy for not having a lot of time for people. People clearly let her down over and over again.
She now grazes as best she can in our ten acres and she will be loved and cared for for the rest of her life.
But I know for certain–because I saw it firsthand–that the majority of horses in this country are not lovingly euthanised and buried under a gum tree. They enter the cycle of horse slaughter, often with terrible, painful injuries and illness, and spend weeks being trucked around, fed rubbish food, kept in pens where other horses attack them, live in fear and die that way.
