Our Saturday started early with the arrival of Hanna, a blind Appaloosa mare from North Carolina. We had agreed to take her a few weeks ago after getting a call from her owner, a riding instructor named Annette S. Hanna had been one of Annette’s lesson mares for many years, and was a real favorite of her students. Annette had lost the lease on her property and had to move her riding operation to another farm that couldn’t accommodate a blind mare.
Annette thought she had found a place for Hanna with a horse rescue in Virginia, but the arrangement fell through and she suddenly was running out of time. No other horse rescues would take a blind horse. Annette offered to pay the full cost of shipping Hanna out to us. (This in itself is very unusual, because most people who call us hoping to place a blind horse here don’t want to spend another dollar on the animal, let alone $1,200 or more to ship it.)
I originally told Annette ‘no’ … we had only one open stall space left in Beauty’s Barn and planned to save that for an emergency case, and we were reserving the only other stall space for a blind horse caught up in a court case in Great Falls, Montana. (We still don’t know whether that horse is coming here or not.)
But I could tell how crushed Annette was when I said we couldn’t take Hanna. I hung up the phone and felt awful. Alayne and I talked and we finally agreed to give Hanna the stall we were saving for an emergency case. I called Annette back with the news. She was elated … and then she cried. She was just so relieved to have found a place for her beloved mare.
We got in touch with our horse transportation outfit, Grand Champion Horse Transportation, and began planning Hanna’s trip out West. Jeff Marks, who owns Grand Champion, has hauled several blind horses for us in recent years, including Nikki who was just a few months old at the time.
In the first photo Jeff is beginning to unload Hanna. This was the first time we’d seen her. She’s a very sweet and pretty mare, and a big girl, too. She came right out of the trailer without a problem, as you see in the second photo. In this photo Hanna is in her stall in Beauty’s Barn, where we fed her breakfast before turning her out into a corral to get some fresh Rocky Mountain air and exercise. By the end of the day, she already seemed to be settling in just fine.
(Click on photos for larger image.)
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