Late on Friday afternoon we had one of those typical horsey disasters. I say "typical" because they usually a) involve fences and b) occur at bad times, i.e., late on a Friday, at night, on a holiday, or any time on a weekend. Never, ever, on Tuesdays at 10 in the morning.
Kate was driving the truck with hay down to the corrals to start feeding when she looked over to the pasture and saw blind Lena lying on her side in deep snow, tangled up in the fence, with a brace post laying across her. Lena had somehow gone right through the fence and was lying on the outside, pinned up against two fenceposts, one at either end of her body. Kate called me — I had just returned inside and was in my office — and Alayne and I grabbed our coats and boots and went rushing out.
We found Lena completely entangled, with fence wires wrapped tightly around her back feet and looped through her front legs. This is yet another reason we don't use either electric fencing or barbed wire with blind horses — either of which would have made this far, far worse. She was facing uphill, with her feet sticking through what was the fence line. Her left rear foot was bleeding profusely. Blind Cash, who we had turned out with Lena for some exercise earlier in the day, was standing calmly right next to her. He knew something was terribly wrong and wasn't leaving her side.
Lena herself was the very definition of calm. When she heard us coming, she raised her head up and nickered, then put her head down. But otherwise she was perfectly still. She didn't thrash around or panic. Lena was waiting patiently for her humans to come help her out of the mess she had gotten herself into. If she had panicked, she could have been seriously injured … or worse, if she had severed part of her foot.
But one thing we have learned in caring for so many blind horses over the years is that generally they don't panic in a situation like this. Many sighted horses would, in fact, thrash around and try to get themselves out of it, and only injure themselves further. But our blind horses — because they have come to trust their humans so much, and because they've learned that they can only get hurt when they panic — tend to stay calm and level-headed in a crisis. This is completely contrary to the myth about blind horses being "dangerous" and likely to injure themselves. Lena knew that she was in a terrible fix, but she knew she couldn't get herself out of it, and she knew that help would arrive. So she just continued to lie quietly in the snow, waiting calmly for us to get there.
Neither Kate nor I thought about whipping out our cellphones to take some quick photos of the mishap until after we got Lena out of it, so you'll have to settle for this view of the scene, a day later:
As Kate ran to get the bolt-cutters, Alayne put a halter on Cash and led him out of the pasture and back to his corral. Then she dashed off to find the soft ropes we use for these situations. (We've seen this movie before.) I stood by Lena, trying to figure out the mess of wires, where to start cutting, and then what the "exit strategy" was going to be. The fact that she was facing uphill, against the fence posts, made it more complicated.
The first thing I cut was the one remaining nail still attaching the top end of the diagonal brace post to the fence post. Lena had broken the bottom end off and dislodged it, and the brace post was laying right across her chest. Once it was free, Kate and Alayne lifted it off and carried it down to the drive.
As Kate applied gentle pressure to Lena's neck as a precaution to help keep her down, I began cutting the wires around her legs. Because some of them were tightly wound around her feet, with a lot of tension, this is precisely the point where "normal" horses might start kicking and thrashing as they hear the bolt-cutters begin snapping through the wires and feel the tension releasing from around their feet. That "trapped" feeling is awful, and as soon as they think they can spring free, they'll try … and only cause more injury.
But Lena didn't budge. She didn't so much as shift her feet as I cut and cut and cut. Here's what was left of the bottom wire:
Here's part of the tangled mess I cut away:
Once we got her free of the wires, we were still left with a horse stuck in deep snow on her side, facing uphill, with fence posts preventing her from getting up on her own. That meant rolling her back over the other way, downhill. Not easy to do with 1,000 pounds (453 kg) of horse! We loosely tied one rope around her front legs and the second rope around her back legs. Kate and I had managed to get a halter on Lena earlier, and Kate was now holding the lead rope to help guide her once we got her up.
Then, on the count of 1-2-3, Alayne pulled on the front legs and I pulled on her back legs. We pulled and pulled, but Lena didn't go rolling over. We realized the snow was so deep she had created a berm underneath her back, so we got down on our knees and scraped it away with our hands.
Finally, several hefty pulls later, Lena rolled over and struggled to her feet. She shimmied with her feet, trying to get the ropes off, but quickly stepped out of them. We guided her down to the drive to assess her injuries. After washing down her feet, it looked like the only injury was to her left rear foot, which had a nice, deep gouge through the heel. She was holding it in the air, trying not to put any weight on that foot.
I called our wonderful equine vet, Dr. Steve Levine from Northern Equine in Danville, Vermont, and a short while later he was here, tending to Lena. He cleaned and dressed the wound, bandaged it up, and gave her injections to help with inflammation.
She is now bearing weight on that hoof again, which is a big relief. We have Lena in a treatment stall while she recovers, and she's on a course of antibiotics and anti-inflammatories in the meantime. I took her out for a brief period this afternoon so she could stretch her legs, and Alayne got the photo at the top of her sniffing that confounded brace post.
So … after all that drama, how did she go into the fence in the first place? None of us saw what Lena did, but we're pretty sure we know what happened because we've seen it before with other blind horses, and it goes like this: Lena just happened to be standing next to the fence when she decided to go down for a nice roll. She rolled and rolled on her back, and everything's going just great … until she rolled completely over on her other side, and — oops! — suddenly her feet are caught up in multiple strands of wire. Lena probably tried to pull her feet out and stand up, but with one wire completely wrapped around that left rear foot, she ended up falling over, taking down most of the remaining wires and knocking the brace post loose so it fell on top of her.
And that's how we found her, sensibly waiting for help to arrive.
Now, having said all this, I don't want to leave you with the impression that this sort of thing happens all the time. It doesn't. We've had far more "fence disasters" and wire lacerations from our very small number of sighted horses over the years than we ever had from our much larger group of blind horses. It was a running joke with our equine vets in Montana, because whenever we had an injury, the chances were it was a sighted horse, not a blind horse.
But still, if a blind horse is going to get hurt, we like the "post-traumatic sensible syndrome" they seem to have!
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