I wasn’t going to write about this. Especially for a start-of-the-week blog post.
We’ve had too many losses this year, and I know quite a few of our regular readers were getting emotional fatigue in recent months from logging on to the blog and having to reach for the Kleenex box too many times.
But I decided last night this was a story that needed to be told. It’s not really about the one we lost — our old blind horse Scout — but about the buddy he left behind, our old mule Roy. I wrote last October how these two senior gentlemen had become the best of friends.
For the past two weeks we’d been battling a severe case of laminitis with Scout. Laminitis can be caused by any number of "triggers." Our equine vet and surgeon, Dr. Erin Taylor, had been out here to treat him, and we thought we had turned the corner. But Saturday morning Scout could barely move. He was trying to shift as much of his weight from his front hooves to his back hooves, so when he walked, he looked like he was going to fall over backwards. It was the most awkward thing I’d seen in a horse. It was painful to watch.
I called Erin, who had me give Scout a large dose of acepromazine and additional anti-inflammatories, and then asked me to bring him in to Missoula and she’d meet me at the clinic. We X-rayed his front hooves, and as she slid the images onto the lightboard, she said, "This is not good." I could immediately tell what had happened. And I knew what it meant. In both feet the coffin bone — also called the pedal bone or P3, the bottom bone in the leg that sits inside the hoof — had separated from the hoof wall. In his left foot the coffin bone was pointed almost straight down, and was only a few millimeters from coming through the sole of his foot. Scout had to be in agony.
I leaned back against the wall, tears welling up. Erin told me about our options. One was to try and alleviate his pain and discomfort to the extent that was even possible, knowing we were only buying some time. As Erin put it, "At the cost of what suffering?" Or we could let him go. There was nothing we could do to reverse the rotation of the coffin bone. I called Alayne to tell her what we had found, and we agreed the only humane thing was to let him go. So Erin and I walked Scout slowly out to a field behind the clinic. As I put my arms around this old horse’s neck and cried, Erin pulled up fresh green grass with her hands from the field and fed it to Scout. He munched quietly for several minutes, enjoying every bit of it.
Finally, Erin injected the first syringe of the euthanasia drug into a catheter in his neck, and then I handed her the second syringe. As she finished injecting the remaining dose, Scout stood there for a few seconds, wobbled back and forth, and then collapsed to the ground.
When I had left the ranch that morning with Scout, we had turned his friend Roy loose, letting him wander at will. Roy has been eager to get out and graze, and he always loves to explore, so we figured he’d be content to spend the warm, sunny spring day wandering the ranch. (Roy can see.) But he never ventured from the area around Beauty’s Barn, where he and Scout lived.
As I drove back in with the horse trailer Saturday afternoon, Alayne — who was at Beauty’s Barn doing chores — told me that Roy watched me drive past the barn and continue on to the house. He hee-hawed as I went by, thinking Scout was on board and coming back. Roy was still staring at the trailer as I got out of the truck and walked inside the house. Thinking that somehow he had missed me unloading Scout, Roy walked into Beauty’s Barn to look for his friend. But Scout wasn’t there.
For the rest of the afternoon and evening, Roy stood in the barn aisle, right next to Scout’s stall, waiting. It broke our hearts to watch him like this. He would disappear out the south door of the barn, nibble on some grass or the hay stacked outside, then come back in and stand vigil next to the stall.
I put the dogs up at Widget’s House last night at 9 p.m. and walked over to Beauty’s Barn, and I could see Roy’s silhouette in the darkened barn aisle. He was still there. I walked into the barn and hugged this old mule. Judging from the piles of poop in the aisle, I could tell he had rarely left that spot.
That’s when I realized I wanted to tell this story. Too many people don’t think of equines this way … as sensitive, thinking, emotional animals who form intense bonds with one another. But they do get attached, and they definitely feel the loss when their buddy disappears.
I walked back down to the house, got the camera, and returned to Beauty’s Barn. That’s when I took the photo above of Roy looking at Scout’s stall. He wasn’t too wild about the flash going off, so he went out the south door and then turned around to look back in:
Today, 24 hours after I returned with an empty trailer, Roy still hasn’t ventured more than 20 yards from that barn door. We’re going to give him a little more time to come to terms with Scout’s death, and then we’ll see who we can pair him up with. But for now, our hearts ache as much for Roy as for gentle old Scout.
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