What a day!

[DaveNay]

Yesterday started out like any other average Saturday. Get up, have a nice breakfast with the wife and then take care of the horses. After that, take care of a few small projects and run a couple errands before a buddy shows up and we light off a couple hundred rounds of .22 and 9mm just for fun.

While we are making noise, we have three new boarder horses arrive to live with us for the winter. The wife and the owner of the horses get them unloaded and put into their paddock to give them time to get used to the place.

After we are done shooting, we are cleaning up and putting away all our stuff when my wife calls out that one of the new horses is laying down on the ground, and if I could come over to help calm her down so she can get her feet under her and stand back up.

So I go over and start soothing the horse, and she stops thrashing around and relaxes some......then relaxes some more......and more......

Then the darn horse is DEAD!

Right in front of a bunch of us. The new horse that had only been on my farm for a few hours is now laying in my barn dead!

So now we spend several hours tracking down the owners and dealing with the arraingments to have the horse removed tomorrow morning. The only redeeming value is the owners were not too upset because they had actually considered having the horse put down prior to moving them to our place. She was 24 years old and not in great health anymore.

We are still kind of in a little bit of shock as this is the first horse we have had die on our property.

Dave

 

[beenthere]

Does your "boarding horse" insurance cover that loss?

 

[DaveNay]

No insurance involved. The owner of the horse had actually been advised recently to have horse put down, however she had not been able to do it yet emotionally. In the end, this was not really a surprise to the family.

Dave

 

[YanmarFever]

Dave,
Do you think maybe the shooting spooked the horse, it got scared & had a heart problem ?? /forums/images/graemlins/confused.gif

 

[Cliff_Johns]

Even if the horse's time was up, it's still got to freak you out. It's still got to make you feel a little guilty. And what if they hadn't been expecting the horse to die?

I hope your wife is dealing with the whole thing all right.


You know, for a minute there, the way you'd written that, I thought you'd accidently shot their horse.

Cliff

 

[DaveNay]

We don't believe so. We were several hundred yards away, with a row of trees and several buildings between us. At that distance a .22 and 9mm are barely louder than a can of beer being opened. /forums/images/graemlins/wink.gif.

Cliff, do ya think I wrote it that way accidentally? /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif My wife is fine, and even the owners of the horse were justs as apologetic to us as we were to them.

The most ironic part was that in the middle of this, the children from the house across the road walked over to spend some time with the horses (one of them is theirs), and I managed to intercept them a few hundred feet away and send them home telling them we were in the middle of a project and for safety sake we couldn't have them around. I immediately called their house and explained to their mom why I had sent them packing and not allowed them to visit with their horse.

Dave

 

[BobRip]

In some ways this worked out well for the owner. She did not have to make the difficult decision and did not have to watch the horse die. I take that as a blessing, although you and your wife did have to deal with the stress.

Bob Rip