Trigger warning:
This entry isn’t for everyone. My horse dies. His downfall and demise was a learning experience, but not really for the faint of heart. It’s really meant for friends, family, and people who can face up to how we as humans can’t leave well enough alone. It’s a tribute to a good horse and a plea for us to do better by animals.
The first peregrine falcon I’ve seen here arrived on a terrible day in a terrible year. This bird is probably just chasing thousands of snow geese that arrived in my valley. I’m thinking it’s a portent of change- at home, and nationally, no matter how the destructive and polarizing presidential election turns out.
The words for horse parts are an exercise in medieval language. Middle English, German, French. Fetlock, pastern, cannon bone, croup, coronet, hock. Navicular hails from Latin.
While equine anatomical terms are not intuitive, the words that describe what we’ve done to horses through breeding are encased in a fortress of acronyms: HERDA, HYPP, SCID, GBED, MH, PSSM1, JEB1 and 2, WFFS. And on and on.
And then there is the apparently hereditary disease that took out Tigger- renamed from DSLD (Degenerative Suspensary Ligament Desmitis) to ESPA (equine systemic proteoglycan accumulation). Researchers needed new alphabet soup when they learned that the dropped rear pasterns we see in these horses are the symptom of something happening throughout the body.
These diseases can be vanquished in a single generation, of course: we just wouldn’t breed the ones that have the bad genes. But that requires clear-eyed commitment to animal health. Breeders have always come up with sometimes bizarre and certainly unscientific rationales for their programs. I’ve heard said a good stallion can “fix” a problem mare, something calling attention to the need for biology education. Sterilizing mares and gelding stallions means loss of income.
And show ring judges can actually select for defects, like the HYPP gene passed on by one stallion to over 55,000 foals. Halter class judges gave high scores to the huge muscle on Impressive, which resulted from a problem in muscle cells that caused unregulated muscle contractions. Since breeders cross fathers and daughters, foals with two defective genes resulted, and those would experience paralysis and seizing up of their diaphragm under exercise, sometimes suffocating them.
The Impressive line was worth so much in the show ring that the American Quarter Horse Association only reluctantly admitted the problem years after it appeared. Today, if I told Tigger’s breeder that he had DSLD, apparently heritable, I doubt that they would change a thing.
Tigger was always different- suddenly growing to 17 hands, an abnormally large size for a Quarter Horse. He had a flat croup like a Thoroughbred and big wide chest. A new vet came on Thursday because no one else was available when he hit crisis stage. She made a common mistake after reading his file describe a Quarter Horse. She came in the barn and headed straight for my other horse’s stall. “I looked at Tigger and thought he was a draft, not a Quarter,” she said. Everyone does. At six feet, I at least had the leg length to ride him.
It wasn’t just Tigger’s size that made him different. On the positive side, he had a quiet, cheerful temperament, learned quickly, and was just a little lazy. He has never done a bad thing to me. I trained him myself, and he would respond to light rein, light leg, and voice.
He was a comeback kid. As a young foal housed in an airtight and humid show barn intended to keep its residents free of that unattractive winter coat, he developed one respiratory infection after another. When another boarder told me to throw him outside and found me a 5 acre pasture for lease, he healed, and never again got sick.
Tigger developed a rare odontogenic tumor that became an experiment in the effectiveness of bleomycin at WSU Veterinary Hospital, and then a surgery. He pulled out.
But he was never going to pull out from this one. It’s fatal for all horses. He and I, along with two vets, have wrestled with it as he has progressively faltered, stabilized at a reduced level, then faltered again. I knew this year was likely to be his last.
The leg that got a diagnosis and finally gave after it couldn’t support the other one. Fourteen months later, that left hind fetlock was nothing like you see here.
With DSLD, their suspensory ligaments turn brittle like old rubber bands and start to give. Their hocks straighten and drive pressure to the fetlock, and the fetlock drops. The “good” left hind you see in the picture above turned large and hard as the pastern angle became more horizontal. And then the crisis in the other foot occurred because it couldn’t compensate anymore.
The vet was due 4 pm on Thursday, but one crisis after another delayed her. She arrived after dark, too late to do anything but call it, hand out a sheet with numbers for pickup services, and schedule the euthanasia for Friday afternoon. She injected Tigger with a morphine-like drug to help get him through the next 24 hours.
Friday morning involved macabre calls to pickup services. Their voicemails tell you to leave a message with “TriCounty Dead Stock Services” and “Rawhide”. They all called back right away, but not a one would pick up that day. They didn’t want their drivers stuck in our notorious Friday traffic on the interstate. I decided that I could manage a carcass over the weekend far better than I could deal with the episodic bouts of pain Tigger was experiencing. The clinic told me how to deter coyotes over the weekend.
The hours dragged on, and the vet was delayed again. I just kept feeding Tigger, carrots and apples and rich green alfalfa. I cut him fresh grass. I gave him bute paste and powder, probably enough to kill his kidneys over time, but enough to get him through this day.
A relatively okay moment on the last day.
This is what hurt looks like.
The vet finally arrived, confirmed the bad foot was swelling and it was definitely time, to reassure me most likely. I knew. We led him to the lawn, she sedated him, put in a catheter, and some minutes later, when he was dozy, she hooked up two big blue syringes of relief. He dropped very suddenly, took two breaths- and peace. Finally, peace. No pain. The horse everyone loved for his superb temperament and affection toward people was finally free.
Throughout the long history of human domestication of horses, our understanding of their behavior has been fogged by cultural filters and biases. I was always told that a horse should never see his fallen buddy- which is a little stupid, if you think about it. In the wild, no one covers their eyes and leads them away when a herd mate dies. But I believed it.
I was surprised when my vets said that instead of sedating Larkey and keeping him in the barn, I should be prepared to lead him out to see the body. He would get closure, they said. Most horses sniff their buddy, then move on to eat grass. Sometimes they nibble an ear.
But when you are herd mates for 19 years, that’s not always how it works. Larkey didn’t want to leave the area, so I had the vet assistant hold him while I wrote a check. After the truck left, he wanted to graze in the area, but would pull when I tried to lead him toward the barn. I needed to cover Tigger as the afternoon was waning, so I pulled Lark into the barn. As I dragged out tarps, he started to cry. I put him in Tigger’s stall, hoping that would help. I could hear him crying again. Then came the bang of the stall door slamming into the wall as he flipped the latch and blew out of the barn. He made a lap around the lawn, screaming, then skidded to a stop by his fallen brother. I didn’t want him to bolt, so I waited and watched as he stood sentinel for a few minutes, then suddenly pulled the tarp from Tigger and started nudging his legs.
That was enough for me. I brought apples and got a halter on him. He dug in and wouldn’t budge, so we stayed there until dusk and cold fell. Suddenly, Larkey’s head dropped, and we trudged disconsolately toward the barn in the dark.
I hope someday we will do better as people. I hope we will stop playing God or Dr. Frankenstein, breeding animals for one trait or another, and ignoring the whole and the healthy. I hope we will stop lying to ourselves that inbreeding is okay, blaming animals for genetic defects, and staying the course when we shouldn’t.
For now, it’s about getting Larkey past this, finding him a new normal in a smaller herd of only one horse and one person. And getting myself past the terrible loss of the best and kindest horse I’ve ever known. I’ll send a donation and card to Dog Mountain in Vermont, and see if they can put a memorial card for Tigger in the chapel with the thousands in his company. I’ll write this post and hope the bleeding inside stops.
Silver Snag Studio 