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54
winter
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spr ing
so overgrown they looked like flippers. I knew I had to get help fast. I
called Dr. Kevin Smith to come out and evaluate the situation. When he
examined Pinto, he explained that the horse has been severely neglected,
but we could administer medication and feed it and work with it to try
to give it another chance at life. We spoke to the son of the owner and he
said he would do this. We left him with some Bute (Phenylbutazone) and
other medicines for the horse and told him what to do. We said we would
be checking in later.
A week went by and I dropped in to check on Pinto and to bring more
supplies. She was looking better. But then I noticed that her feet hadn’t
been trimmed. I asked the son of the owner why the feet hadn’t been
attended to. He assured me they would be getting to it that very day. So I
felt really good about the situation and so did Dr. Smith. We really felt the
son was going to get behind helping this horse get better.
A month later, I was riding in the area and had an intuition that I should
go see Pinto. When I pulled up, there was another man there and I said,
“Where’s Pinto?” He looked very sad and ashamed and put his head down,
and pointed to her barn. The temperature was over 100 degrees that day
and when I opened the stall door it was like opening an oven. There were
hundreds of flies everywhere. Pinto was lying on the stall floor, unable to
stand. She was lying in about nine inches of horse manure, and her hooves
were much worse than before. Flies swarmed over her body. I didn’t know
whether to cry or scream.
I called Dr. Smith to come out to evaluate the situation. He was very
angry when I told him what had happened. He had called Pinto’s owner
three times and was told every time that things were going great. I went
back into the stall and brought water to her. I cut up a carrot and she
nibbled on it. She was very weak, but her eyes changed from deep sadness
to a bit of hope. I kept hugging her and kissing her and telling her it was
going to be all right.
When Dr. Smith arrived, he said it was too late; Pinto would have to be
Alvin, a paint, (on the left) and Diddy, a brown draft pony, have lived together for
the past three years. “The day this photo was taken,” reports April, “Alvin got out
of his turnout and romped through the mud (it had rained the day before) and
got himself all dirty; Diddy joined in.”