Anguston’s Prince - On loan to God.

Today I am not losing you

I am sending you ahead as a messenger

To tell the others on loan to God

Someday we’ll all be together.

Having a large herd, pack, and group of house pets means you have to get comfortable with the inevitable fact that they will all die one day. All of the 40 odd animals we have here will either be gone suddenly, or as in Gus’ case we will have to make a tough decision.

In the past we have lost dogs that were rehab failure, some to poor health from bad breeding, but none of our original or planned pack members have perished and that is going to be difficult. There was nothing as bitterly devastating as the first horse we lost - our homebred Lottie, our first to be born in our herd, our first to die in the herd, and sickeningly on her first Birthday. A tragic accident meant we had to put her to sleep at the side of the road. Big May was an inevitable as she had never kept well; small redworm disease, cancer, abscesses in her skin where she’d been shot with an air rifle, and finally laminitis and colic, but at least we had the knowledge that we had extended her life by 5yrs and she had been exceedingly well cared for by us. She was the first “Horse” here, Gus was the second (all others were shetland sized ponies) so it did feel like the beginning of the end of something when she went. Byron was just a devastation so painful I can still barely write about it, but perhaps it was worse as he was the first we went to the field and found lying there dead. He was fit and young and bouncing around 12hrs earlier - now he was flopped in the middle of a bush with no signs of pain or illness. Not knowing what happened means you can never really come to terms with it. My way of getting over the loss of each of them has been to learn a lesson and put in measures to prevent it happening again. With Byron that’s not been easy.

Today we are going to send our beautiful Clydesdale Stallion , Gus, off on loan to God. This is the first time I have planned an exit for one of the herd. It’s a very mixed feeling. On one hand he is stood outside, oblivious, and happy to be back on the yard, calling over the fence to me for grub and cuddles. On the other he hasn’t gained the weight he’d need to in order to make winter anything other than miserable and dangerous for an 18yr old giant (that’s pretty elderly for a Clydesdale), his gut appears not to be in perfect working order, he may have a touch of laminitis or his arthritic knee is about to flare up, but he’s pretty lame and his feet are smelly. However, most importantly he is dangerous to handle, especially in the stable, and as he winters in and my baby is due in January I can not take the risk of being injured by him. We are talking about the horse who has crushed me, trampled me, broken my feet and my fathers - deliberately, put me in a head lock and tried to remove my head, charged me down into a ditch, pinned me to trees, trapped me in stables, kicked countless family members, charged through 3 electrified fences to attack a horse and it’s owner trampling their dog in the process, had two vets refuse to treat him, and is utterly impossible to inject with anything - worming him takes hard hats and 3 people.

He came home from summer grazing yesterday. We put him there to give him the best opportunity to gain weight and prepare for winter whilst we spent all summer looking for another home for him - but who, in a recession, can offer an elderly, but dangerous, ton of Stallion who eats 90kg of haylage a day in winter, a home? No one, that’s who. We had some nibbles, but no real offers. Had we had 100 genuine offers it’s unlikely more than one or two would have actually been suitable, but we didn’t even have that issue to deal with.

As we walked him up to the lorry for his last trip home, to a field where a hole has already been dug, I watched his tail and feathers flowing, and his rich liver chestnut roan, glowing in the golden sunlight. He looked magnificient. I wished we didn’t have a reason to do it - I wished I was just talking myself into it, but I’m not. The reasons are very real, and this horrible decision is also the last good one we can make for him. What on earth would be the point in watching him get sore, watching him get thinner as the grass disappeared, seeing him skeletal once spring arrives next May? what is the point in risking my unborn child to keep a horse going that can’t have too long left now anyway? He has no mares to run with, but can smell them on the hill, and will stand frustrated and stiff in a stable for 8 months. There’s no dignity in that.

His last day with us yesterday, where he got to say hello to the herd members he’d not grazed with this year, and he had the sun on his back all day was a totally different kind of day. Today the weather is reflecting my mood, it’s driech outside and somehow that makes it easier to do it on a day when you know he’s not enjoying himself so much. I’ve done everything I can to prepare him and the family for him going, and now we just need to do it because the waiting is agony - with the others there was no waiting any longer than the time it took the vet to arrive, and with Byron none at all. This has been planned, the digging of the grave, the emptying of the field, the last trip to collect him, the prepartion of the tools for the job, arranging for someone to do it - each part of that has been agonising, but at the same time it has helped to know I have had a little control over it this time, and I have been able to make everything right. Byron never got to come home to be buried; my first baby horse lies in a strangers field, in years to come no one will know he is there or who he was. Gus will be laid next to his wife May, and I know that once I plant a tree over the top of the second “Horse” to come to Rhinamain, once that beautiful couple are resting side by side, that the end of the start has really begun.

Thank you Gus for all you have taught me.

This entry was posted on 09/09/2011 at 09:41 am and is filed under Horses. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.