Well my Mother has always had a love of horses and we have been pleading with her to scale back operations since she has gotten into her 80's. All to no avail, she had actually gotten hold of not one but two stallions while we were gone from our last visit. So it seems that her intentions were to keep the horse operaton going until she was just physically unable to do it any longer.
That finally happened this spring. She had a filly that she was going to sell and so it needed its shots. She had Robert help her load the horse and take it to the vets at Silver City. In order for the vet to work with it she had to have a halter on it. So she got Robert to hold it with a rope around the neck. Meanwhile she got into the trailer with the filly and attempted to put a halter on it.
This filly had not been worked with and so it was very skittish. Mom fell which excited the horse even more and it began jumping - fighting to get loose. It landed on Mom's leg several times. Breaking the leg just below the knee. What made this worse was that she has artifical knees and it broke at a diagonal across where the joint was inserted into the bone. So she initially went to a hospital right there in Silver City.
They did not have the expertise to work with this and so she was transferred to Las Cruces. A surgeon put a fixator on her leg to stablize it. A series of rods and pins from the thigh down to the foot. It locked her leg in position so that it could heal. The surgeon warned us that if the bone did not knit there was chance that her leg could actually be amputated.
Moreover, lack of bloodflow from swelling had killed a muscle that goes down the front of the leg. This muscle moves the foot up and down - so no more driving. The surgeon also warned us that at her age, the leg would heal slowly and the remaining muscles may not recover 100%. With her COPD and other health problems, she needed to live closer to medical care - not in the middle of the desert.
She did say that we needed to have a fire sale with the horses. So she saw that we needed to get rid of them. I did try to sell some locally by contacted the local FFA. I got a few tire kickers, but no one actually came out to look at them. I knew that there are few local buyers for these horses, quarterhorses are the preferred breed for the ranches as they are a working horse. The Peruvian Paso horses are a gaited horse and so there just isn't much demand for them.
Meaning that buyers would most likelly be several states away. So transportation and logistics would be a problem. They would all need shots to go out of state. Most of the horses had not been worked with, so we would have the same problem that Mom had - how to get halters on unbroken horses. It would have been a long summer of wrangling horses if I had followed her plan. Sure she would lose the money from the sales of the horses, but none of them were that valuable. Plus, she was spending around $2500 per month on hay and so forth. So in year, the saving from not buying hay and feed would more than pay for the horses. Finally, even if we got experienced horse people out there to work with the horses, there would be a liablity issue if someone else got hurt.
So I made a few phone calls and found a horse rescue place to take them all. We were planning on taking the oldest Palimino and her colt back to Ohio with us. So far, so good - or so we thought. The horse rescue place put out photo's of the horses and let some people know what would be coming soon. One of the people happened to be a friend of Mom's and immediately sent out a bat alert that someone was trying sell her horses. It became a crap storm after that.
Mom was furious and called me from the hospital. We actually got into a shouting match over the phone. People were wanting to come pick up horses but I refused to let them do it as I had already signed a contract with the rescue folks and also because of the above reasons. I got some hate messages on facebook messenger.
Someone even got Becky's phone number and sent threatening messages to her. They spoofed a bogus number from Nebraska and said that if don't stop what you are doing, you will be dead! Later Mom said someone was coming to get a horse. I told her a truck was pulled in front of the gate and that I had a 9mm pistol if they got past that. Things had gotten that bad. People were even threatening the horse rescue people. All this commotion for a bunch of horses!
It seems that nothing is easy when it comes with dealing with issues related to Mom. So the day came for the horse rescue to load the horses. The 1st trailer was loaded and pulled to the side. However someone forgot to latch the gate to the trailer. The horses began to ease out. A teenaged son tried to be a hero and rush to the gate and shoo them back. They rolled him over, but luckily he escaped injury.
Well we joked, that 1st trailer was just practice. We finally got them all loaded and off they went. A few days later we suspect that someone was posing as a brand inspector called us and threatened that if we tried to move the Palimino and the colt to Ohio we would be fined. Well by that time we were done. So we got hold of another horse rescue place to take the last 2 horses as the 1st bunch were finished.
It was a younger guy and he was not experienced pulling a trailer. Even though the address is on the front of the property, he turned into the place next door and had to turn around. By that time it was dark. But loading the horses was not a problem. We watched as he left with a feeling of relief. Which lasted for about 30 seconds as he missed a turn in the driveway and began heading across the mesquite to the mountains! I franticly ran down the drive waving a flashlight to get him to stop. He went well over 100 yards before he realized his mistake.
His girlfriend was not much help in directing him to back up so I helped as best I could. It probably took a good 30 minutes to get him out of his predictament. I walked him out to the gate so that he wouldn't have any more drives into the brush. When I saw his trailer lights on the highway North of Rodeo I finally relaxed.
We stayed another day or two to get things set as far as a security camera and better locks, then we left. Becky had done some cleanup intially, but after the big blowup we halted any work on the house. Much later Mom came around, still not pleased about everything but maybe more resigned to the fact that she could not return to her previous life. So we at least have a truce. The plan is to move Mom to Houston close to Heather when she is recovered enough to be moved. But I have never seen people get so riled up about a bunch of horses in my life.
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