A friend recently turned me on to a blog that tells the compelling saga of Argus, a horse who spent 16 years confined in a tiny pen before being rescued. I was captivated as his foster mom gradually discovered more information on Argus’ horrifying past. This got me thinking about the paths that our horses travel before they come to us, often with a history that we can only speculate about.
When I bought my horse this is what I was told: he had lived on pasture board at the previous owner’s place, where she had taken him out of the pasture a couple of times a month to do light dressage with him. It was not known if he had ever jumped before. This was the background my trainer was able to provide me with.
Seeing him for the first time brought new questions, a few that I was only ever able to guess the answers to. When I bought Jack Daniels, he was wearing a nylon halter that was unraveling and held together with duct tape. He had a dirty tangled mane that was about two and half feet long. He had a potbelly but no muscle. He had a shiny patch of black skin on his withers. His knees and front feet were two different sizes.
The mane and the wormy belly and the muscle could all be explained by living on rough board and not getting worked. We guessed that at some point he sustained an injury to his left knee serious enough that he was either put on stall rest or couldn’t put his full wait on it. This explained the big puffy knee, but also the feet. His left foot was normal, but his right front had spread out, becoming wider and flatter as it absorbed the weight usually borne by injured leg.
Like Argus, the first thing Jack Daniels got was a haircut. I spent over two hours pulling his mane. To me, this was something I could do right away to show that Jack was now a beloved showhorse. Jack didn’t mind undergoing a two hour beauty session for two reasons: first, he had a really bad coat so the hair practically fell out and second, because he just loved being around people that much that it didn’t matter what was being done to him. In the end it was not his scar or his feet that puzzled me the most but his personality.
I’ve thought so many times about how Jack loved people. I think about how I often had a hard time giving him an IM shot because he kept trying to nuzzle me and how when we drove him through a jump shoot on that first day he headed straight for us each time so he could stop and say “hi”. Then I think about how this people-centric horse came from a life in a pasture with little human contact. I wonder if that experience influenced his personality. I think of how lonely he must have been and that’s usually when I have to stop thinking or else I’ll start to tear up.
I had the advantage that many owners don’t; I had my horse’s papers. I was able to see who bred him, what states he had lived in and for how long. This provided enough background for me to track down his parents who were still at the farm where he was bred. I never contacted the breeders because I was terribly shy and didn’t know what to say. After Jack died, I decided to contact them to see if there were any full siblings to my sweet horse that were running around. It was too late. The website had been taken down and I found an article stating that all the horses had been seized and the owners were facing animal cruelty charges. Instead of answering my questions, this news raised even more of them. Was he neglected as a foal? Is that how he got his scars and his temperament?
