The previous post (Feb 13) is the first in a long while. Lots to catch up on.
Kelby the trainer was in a vehicle accident the day after she got her new mustang (she was accepted into the 2024 Makeover), from TN by way of GA. She will be OK but has a good long recovery.
So - Kai is back here.
I have tried to edit the various videos I've taken into short connected clips and I am useless thus far, so I'm uploading some screenshots from the videos and added below.
The following is what I wrote Saturday:
Saturday February 10, 2024
It’s a beautiful spring morning; cardinals are singing (a classic sound I know so well from living in MA) and crows are calling. The sun is slowly making its way higher into the sky, and temps are cool but mild and pleasant.
I am taking a breath ...and a moment ...to just pay attention, quietly.
The last week flew by.
Kai stayed at the trainers for a few days after Kelby the trainer was in an accident, broke a vertebrae in her neck and needed to get the training horses out.
Picked Kai up yesterday, Friday, and then stopped at Sumter Equestrian Center next door to have her hooves trimmed under sedation… (not ideal, and not what I would prefer but fronts needed doing, and this takes pressure off me to complete the challenge of the feet before they get TOO long; she still is not giving all four happily and consistently).
Kai's return home could not be without some drama although the trimming, the sedation, the trailering home, the delivery, etc. all went well.
She was eating everything in sight and this had me a little concerned, but there really wasn't a lot I could do about it right now. Mostly she seemed content enough to be here.
After a few hours hanging with her in various parts of the yard I decided she was fine and I’d go inside and take a break. 60 seconds later as I was just out of sight, Catherine my neighbor started screaming at me from her (abutting) back yard, shouting that Kai is stuck. I chuckled, and visualized her in the midst of a bunch of vines because that’s where she had been eating (virtually everything). I was already somewhat worried about her getting colic from eating weird things, but that wasn’t the concern for now.
It turned out she had stuck herself between two trees, literally… and could not free herself.
You can’t make it up.
It appeared to me that she got lodged at the soft point between two protrusions or tubercles of her (primarily) left femur. The right side was similarly lodged but it was more obvious on the left. It seemed like three hours, but it was just a little over a very intense 80 minutes or so that it took us to collectively get her free, and it was 5 pm..... dark is not all that far off. We tried everything… including Jeff, Catherine’s husband, using a ladder to climb above the horse and lodge himself between the trees in an attempt to get them to split enough for her to squish out. I knew this wasn’t going to work; she was between two 12-14-inch diameter, 80-90-foot-tall longleaf pines. They bend in the wind at about 60 feet up, but not down here at 3-5 feet off the ground.
This is a situation where any horse person would recognize the potential panic it could cause for Kai: a human (the ladder was bad enough…) looming rather unsteadily above her back end… where lions and cougars attack.
There ended up five of us; also difficult, because typically mustangs as wild horses are not fond of multiple people surrounding them at once, and Kai is generally used to dealing with only one human at a time.
We discussed using a chain saw but debated the noise and proximity to her hind legs…. Jeff volunteered trying to use his larger electric saw….. and IT WORKED! Some careful planning of where to cut a wedge, and having Catherine, John and Tracy (my other neighbors) pulling the rope to get that tall tree to land without hitting her.
My only regret is that I was so ensconced in the situation I only took this one photo, and it just does not come close to describe what we had going on!
Once the tree fell, the funniest was how she just walked out slowly, casually, calmly... went about six feet before putting her nose down to eat some palmetto!
And as a note: she was AMAZING through all this. I cannot tell you how stuck she was. Periodically she made efforts to free her self, pushing forward or backward, ending in frustration. She seemed like she consciously stifled her panic... knowing it would not help. It was heartwarming when I consoled her and I swear she understood, at the very least, that we were trying to help (in pic above she had probably just tried to squeeze through or backward, because the lead line is nearly taut, which it was not ever, unless she showed she wanted to try).
She was so stuck, and Catherine and Jeff (much more horse experience than me) confessed later that they were fearing she'd break a leg and/or we'd have a put-to-sleep situation.
And, even with their experience, neither of them had ever seen this happen.
Sigh... apparently she was not injured.
Last night at 1;30 AM, I heard the sound of logs rolling… (I was thinking that the cut-down tree and resulting logs were tumbling down the hill even though we had moved them between any and all trees with the potential for this to happen again). Taco, Tori and I all startled and jumped out of bed. Approaching the back lanai, I realized it was Kai galloping across the back paddock (and there are a lot of trees back there... yikes! Eye injuries! Tripping on stumps or branches! Crashing into the fence! So many ugly possibilities...)!
But as can often be with horses (and myself being alone and in the dark) what really am I going to do...?
I tried to determine if it was out of panic - or possibly joy.
Hoped for the latter.
Nothing eventful came of that and I am so thankful.
She is still (now writing this Wed 2/14) periodically galloping "victory laps" across the paddock.... It has me worried (like, quite worried... and probably the subject of the next post), but, at least she feels good.
Also have not photographed the tree debris..... this is some of it.
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