Where Do I Start?

The past five days have been a whirlwind of chaos for me and I finally got a good night of sleep last night to recover from everything.  I’m really not sure how to tell you everything, so I suppose I’ll just start at the beginning and see where we end up. 

First, there’s that place outside of Fairmont with the 21 dead animals.  By the time Friday rolled around, three more animals had died.   See that pile of “stuff” slightly to the right and in front of the big black horse?  That’s a dead mini horse. 

 

Yes, I was there.  I told the sheriff that I’d take whichever horses did not get rescued by the other 40 people that called the sheriff’s department and said they would help by fostering.   But when they finally got the go-ahead from the judge to seize the animals on Friday, guess who showed up?

NOBODY. 

Just me and a buddy with a stock trailer.  23 surviving horses and not one other person who said they’d help even showed up.  And here I was thinking my faith in humanity would be renewed when we got there to see a chaotic mess of trailers and people all over trying to help.   The one thing that did change was my outlook on the police of Marion County.  I take back everything I said about those guys!!  They were awesome!  Without those deputies and the sheriff helping us out, we would never have caught some of those horses.  And if they hadn’t been there with their 4WD to haul our fat butts back up to the ridge after bringing down a set of horses, we would have died somewhere between horse 10 and horse 14.

I didn’t get many pictures that day.  There just wasn’t any time.  You’ll just have to believe me when I say you’d probably not want to look at them anyway.   I wish I could clear away the memory of the burn pile with unburned horse legs sticking out of the bottom.  Or the several piles of decaying dead animals.  Or the huge bull hanging from a tree over a stream, eviscerated – his guts still in a pile below his feet.  

Not ONE horse on that place was easily caught.  They all had to be tricked/cajoled/lured/lassoed or just plain wrestled in order to get them down to the road and trailers.  Once they were caught, most of them settled down and were docile, but there was no way they were going to be caught easily.  It makes me wonder what their lives were like when they were caught by the guy that had them.  I have 26 horses here on this farm, and all but two will walk right up to a stranger in the pasture and put their head in a halter. 

It took two whole days to get everyone to the quarantine farm about five miles away from here.   Stallions and mares were running together (of course) and it looks like a couple of the minis are ready to foal any day now.  The horses have to stay with me (and can’t be castrated) until a judge decides that the asshat isn’t getting them back. 

I’ll post tomorrow with pics of the new guys at the quarantine farm.  But now it’s time to go feed everyone and unload the hay we got late last night.