My favorite saying about horses is this: "If there's a way, they will." Our horses, blind and sighted alike, continue to find novel ways to do things to get themselves into a jam … things that you wouldn't think possible.
Yesterday afternoon I was in my office, about to hit the "save" tab on the day's blog post, when Cindy called me on the intercom phone. "We've got a problem. Marie's stuck on the feeder," she said. I asked, "She's in the feeder?" Cindy said, "No, she's kind of wrapped around the feeder and can't get up."
I told Alayne what had happened, grabbed my coat, put my boots on, and rushed out to the corrals.
There was Marie, our elderly blind mare, just as Cindy had described … lying on the ground, straddling the big tire feeder. As luck would have it, the feeder was just big enough to fit entirely inside her legs, her belly was right up against the edge of the feeder, and she couldn't figure out how to extract herself from this predicament. Any other time of the year, we would have muscled the 200-lb tire feeder out of the way, but it was locked down tight, frozen in a foot of ice and snow.
Cindy and I pondered the situation and realized that the only thing to do was to roll her over onto her other side, away from the feeder. This is definitely from the "easier said than done" category of things-to-try-in-life. As we went off in search of ropes and lariats, Alayne brought out the camera for me (hey, I know a blog moment when I see one!).
Now, what we were about to do was very tricky. We had to loop ropes around her legs, make sure she could still step out of them quickly once we got her up on her feet, hope she didn''t freak out once we started pulling, and keep ourselves safe from flailing hooves.
I will say this: Our blind horses are incredibly calm, trusting and sensible. That's one reason Marie wasn't really struggling before we got there. She realized she was stuck and was waiting for us, her humans, to come help. We have had other situations here where a sighted horse might have broken a leg or otherwise seriously injured itself, but a blind horse doesn't panic and patiently waits for help.
In the photo at the very top of this post, Cindy and I have looped ropes around Marie's front and back feet. Notice she's quietly lying there.
Next came the hard part … trying to pull Marie's 1,000 lb body completely over:
You can see in that photo she's extended her legs out and is trying to figure out what the heck we're doing to her.
Cindy and I also have to get her body to move in unison, both front and back ends at the same time, which is also easier said than done because of the sheer size and how her weight is distributed. Here we're starting to get her rolling but we're not in unison yet:
Now we're getting there:
Then we've reached the tipping point and I'm scrambling to get out of the way of her back feet … I'm closer to them than it appears in the photo and I don't know what she's going to do when she rolls over onto her other side:
Success!
She stands there calmly while I walk her out of the ropes around her feet:
And then Marie's boyfriend, blind Hawk, comes over to see what's going on. Through this entire episode he's been 30 feet away, eating hay from another feeder and ignoring his maiden-in-distress. Hawk had this "Did I miss something?" expression on his face:
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