Transcript
Hi, I'm Dan Slone.
Welcome to Dan's Tiki Bar, and welcome to this episode of Bits & Peaces. Last time we were talking about Goody 4 Shoes and her passing. This time I'd like to tell you a little more about Go-Go.
You remember Go-Go came along with Arcadia. I traded a paint job for my first horse trading. He was a gray, slightly dappled horse, sort of middle-aged horse, neither old nor particularly young. And, if you recall, Martha, I thought, was trained in taking care of horses. But what she told me after I had gotten this horse was that no, she arrived at the stables and the horse was already ready for her. She rode and came back and somebody else took care of the horse. So this was all new to her, but she was game. She ended up figuring out how to saddle the horse, how to deal with farriers and take care of hooves, and was just great with Go-Go, and with Goody as well.
My job was simpler. I mucked out stalls and I kicked hay out of the loft into their feeding trough and I took care of the fences so that they stayed in. I didn't have a lot of tasks, but I actually liked having the horses around. I'm not that fond of interacting with the horses, but I liked seeing them out in the field. They're beautiful. I actually liked the smell of the horses, too. It was just a very pleasant farm smell, and they were sweet enough. But for me, they were just big pets not really working animals of any sort.
So, Go-Go was lonely after Goody died, and we were trying to figure out how to deal with that. We brought one horse onto the property and that was a horse named Ruth Ann. By this point, I'd gotten a little tired of having to do all of the horse chores, especially keeping the fences, because every time there was a storm a tree would fall on the barbed wire fences and they had to be restrung in order to keep the horses in. So this time we traded chores. Ruth Ann's mom would do chores, would help fix fences and do things for Ruth’s room and board. And there really wasn't much board to put up with, she just ate in the field and her owner came by every once in a while, gave her some oats and kept up with her vaccinations and things like that, so she took good care of her.
But Ruth Ann lived there, and she was supposed to be comfort for Go-Go, supposed to be a companion, but in fact she barely spent any time with him. She didn't like hanging with Go-Go, and in fact, she had this weird thing that if any person walked in the field, she'd be far off in the field, and she would see them and she would immediately start charging toward them. Not that sort of excited, maybe they have an apple, maybe they have a carrot sort of charge. No, she was charging to run them down and, if you didn't step out of the way at the last minute, I’m confident she would run over you. She never ran over anyone actually, but she also was going too fast to stop by the time people stepped out of the way. So we always advised people watch out for her. She'll try to run you over and she became known as Ruthless instead of Ruth Ann, so that didn't work out. She stayed there for many years on the farm, but it wasn't really what we were looking for, so we advertised for a retirement horse.
The idea was we wanted a horse that didn't really need to be ridden, didn't really need a lot of human interaction, just a horse to keep Go-Go company. And the perfect horse seemed to appear in response to this. We got an answer that said this horse had had pneumonia, had recovered from pneumonia, but the vet said that she shouldn't be ridden in anymore, that it would be bad for her. And so she really needed a place to retire and that sounded perfect, so we brought her on over. Now, first problem, we had neglected in our ad to say healthy.
We just said retirement horse. This horse got to our farm. And before the horse came, a vet who was substituting for Tim, we’ll call her Tina, had signed off on this horse. Tina had said this horse was okay for us to take. We brought the horse over to the farm and it was immediately apparent that this horse was not well. This horse was not recovered from pneumonia. This horse still had pneumonia, and before long Tina was over at our farm having to deal with this horse. The horse had to have a blanket over it almost all the time and it pretty much stayed in the stall and had to have its lungs periodically drained And Tina indicated that this was a process that she needed some help with, that somebody was going to have to hold the horse still for her to insert this needle into the horse’s lung and drain fluids. It wasn't going to be me. That's not the sort of thing I could do without being passed out next to the horse. But Martha, a former physical therapist, steps in and says “Okay, I can handle that.” So Martha and Tina get in the stall with Precious, the new horse. And Precious gets sedated, gets a little sedative which Martha says “Now this horse is going to be okay, right?” cause she starts wobbling a little. And Tina says “No, she's gonna be fine. I just gave her enough so that, you know, she won't flinch when we start draining her lung. And the horse wobbles a little more and then the horse falls on top of Martha, passes out falls on top of Martha. The horse was fine, but Martha then went through weeks of therapy for her leg, which was injured in the fall.
So Tim returns. Now, the return of Tim was always a dramatic event at the farm. Tim comes over to the farm and, on that particular day, he had a dead dog wrapped up in canvas, but tied to the front of his Jeep because he hadn't gotten a chance to take the dog, who he had put down at the owner's request, but he hadn't had a chance to take it into the clinic for it to go through their removal process. So he didn't want the dog inside the Jeep.
So the dog’s tied to the front bumper of the Jeep when Tim pulls up and proceeds to chew us out for bringing this sick horse onto our farm and having to deal with it. But Tim took over the treatment of Precious and everything was fine for a while.
Then, one morning, it was a fall morning. The air was crisp, and I walked out to the barn and you have to reach into the barn to turn on the lights. And I reach into the stall that Precious lived in. I reached in, turned on the lights and Precious is plainly dead on the floor in the stall. I'm looking at this going this is not going to be good. This is not a surprise not really a surprise, but it's not to be good.
So I call the guy with the backhoe. So backhoe guy kind of hears it in my voice that I'm concerned that it might be hard to get this horse out of the stall and he says “Yeah, it'll cost a little more” and I say “How much?” and he says “This time it will cost $75.” “That's okay. We can handle that. Let's go ahead and come over and bury this horse.
Now, I have in my mind, the scene from Animal House. You may remember the scene in Animal House where they bring a horse up into the Dean's office. I can’t remember what it is. And the joke’s going to be, he's going to open the door and find this horse in there and he's going to have to figure out how to get the live horse out of his office. But then they accidentally scare the horse, they fire a gun and scare the horse and the horse dies of a heart attack there in the office. And behind the Dean as he's on the phone, calling for sanctions for this fraternity, you hear the chainsaw start up as the guys are trying to get the horse out of the office.
Well, I have that image in my mind as to how this horse is going to have to come out of the stall because it is stiff. It’s four legs to the ceiling stiff. And so I'm there the day the backhoe guy comes, and I'm wondering how this operation is going to go. It takes him about two seconds because all he does is flip the horse on its back and drags it out of the stall. And it really wasn't any different than when they’d gotten Goody, only they had to flip the horse on its back for a moment to get it out of the stall and took it out into the field just like Goody and, in fact, had dug a hole over near where Goody was. We kind of liked this place now because the daffodils would come back in the spring, and it seemed like a good place to bury the horse.
And again, as I walk out behind the backhoe dragging the horse, there are two dozen kids on this fence. They come like seagulls to a french fry. I have no idea how they knew that this was happening or how they got there or where they came from. We'd live there now substantially longer, and we'd still not seen these kids around. I don't know where they came from.
They planted precious there near Goody, and the thing that I remember most about that day though is, remember now, this is the second animal within a fairly short period of time that Go-Go has seen dragged off by the backhoe. And on that particular morning, as they're dragging Precious out of the corral, I see Go-Go, and he won't come out of his stall. And he's just peeking out as he watches this body go by and he won't come out of his stall at all because he's figured something is going on here. These horses keep getting planted in the yard out there, but maybe the best lesson of our time with Go-Go was after we left the farm.
As we were planning on moving away, we wanted to find a good home for Go-Go and we learned there was a family. Actually, our vet told us that there was a family that was looking for a horse. They had kids and they were good to their animals, and so we gave them Go-Go, and it turns out that Go-Go thrived. He went to this house, and they told us he was easy to ride, they saddled him up. And the way, of course, he'd gotten the name Go-Go was you’d kick him, and he wouldn't go. And you'd end up shouting go go, but they didn't have to. You just barely touched him and he would he would go and he loved having the children ride him.
And, in the end, it turned out he didn't hate being ridden. He just hated being ridden by adults, and that sort of taught us another lesson there at the farm. That everything, no matter what you think its challenge is, no matter how you think it might be broken, everything has a place and a place of happiness.
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