I got it straight from the horse’s mouth. Our chestnut mare Tahoe was laying on the ground in a stall at our rescue ranch with the winter sun shining on her face. She was too weak to stand for very long periods. I was attending to her with a very heavy heart. We were in the process of making the decision to euthanize her, and I was stroking her face.
“Hey Albert,” she said with her big brown eyes. “If horses are God’s gift to man, why would man treat them so badly? Why would they take the best years that we have to offer and use us up until we are spent, and then turn us out to the auction barns to be purchased by the killers? You know, it’s alright. I am tired, and I don’t have the strength to go on. I’m ready to let go. It is time.”
The scene has replayed in my mind a thousand times, especially each time that I helped another abused or dying horse move on. The answer has never come. The question still remains imprinted into my minds eye. I search for the answer. Not long after laying Tahoe to rest, both Kathy and I re-read Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, but our broken hearts found no solace. We only found a greater unanswered question in her words. Why would man mistreat beasts of burden so poorly and carelessly?
I spent many days backside at the Finger Lakes Race Track in Western New York State in the early 1980’s. I witnessed broken down thoroughbreds from Saratoga and Belmont with their front legs in ice buckets so that they would be able to run on arthritic and sore legs. I watched the blue goose (a horse ambulance) pull up to down horses with broken and shattered legs to remove them from the track so that the next race can begin. They were all former champions, and if you ever stood backside at a race horse barn when the bell rings and the gate opens, all the thoroughbreds are lined up with their chests pressed against the stalls ready and willing to run.
Willingness in animals shouldn’t be construed as a license for abuse. If you own an animal and it makes a living for you in any genre or form, then you owe it to them to treat them with the respect that they deserve. They at least deserve a dignified procession to the grave.
There is no genre of the horse world that is immune from it. I have had to protect my wife from barrel racing horses that were so stoved up and sore that to merely touch their flank they would try and kick her head off. She would still attempt to massage them so that they could run for their pretty little barrel racer.
I vividly remember the first time that my fingers slipped over the hair ball like protrusion on the nuchal ligament of a dressage horse that had been surgically altered. The purpose of the alteration was so that he couldn’t raise his head. I thought it was a spasm until my wife informed me it was a common practice to cosmetically correct conformation in some competitive circles. You snip the ligament at the base of the skull and it prevents the animal from standing with it’s head too high. They show better!
The American Mustang is standing in pens by the thousands as I write. They have nowhere to run. They are stuffed back to back and side to side. Collected by the thousands by the BLM, they are standing in urine and feces soaked surrounds with no chance of adoption. The economy has tanked, and no one is there to adopt them. They were supposedly rounded up because of the damage they are doing to grazing lands. They should inherit the earth, not the cattle that man wants to raise on it for their bloody thirst for meat.
My only answer came from our rescue quarter horse Sage, who we found in a barn full of miniatures, in the back dark recesses with sore and arthritic knees. One warm summer day, I was standing in the middle of one of our fields. I was watching a mother eagle teach her eaglet to fly. She would let it soar and when it got just far enough away she would give a shrill whistle and it would whistle back, then return to the nest. Sage walked up to me, stood alongside of me, and wrapped her neck and her big bucket head around my neck in an embrace. As a man, I have never been touched greater by animal husbandry.
Sometimes late at night, I’m ashamed to admit, that when I’m drifting off to sleep and my mind replays all the beautiful animals that it was my mission to bring to God, I cry for the species Equus.