A (Hopefully) Rare Visit to the Soapbox

Rather than spending her time gathering money to pay for Bella's and Rosie's vet fees and giving my friend back her board money, the owner of the farm the two horses were staying at has decided to go on a mud-slinging campaign against yours truly. Every unfounded rumour spread by horse people (horse people are a catty lot, go figure) is being spread about me now.

It doesn't matter very much. Anybody who owns a horse is going to have another person who owns a horse saying nasty things about them. And everybody who owns horses has friends who think they're great. The same is true here. The owner of that farm has many happy clients and many people learning excellent skills from her. And the horses that I saw at her farm yesterday, when I went to check while I was deciding whether or not to report her to the police, were on the thin side, but basically fine. I think Rosie and Bella were unlucky because they are special: in Rosie's case, she is an enormous horse (a Percheron) who eats surprising amounts of hay, and in Bella's case, she was, until a few weeks ago, a nuring mother. Just try nourishing a growing foal without becoming a bag of bones.

However, no matter how you look at it, the two horses came away from her stable undernourished and neglected. Either they are both sick, in which case the stable owner ought to have noticed, or they were not fed enough. It seems unlikely that both horses would be sick enough to drop hundreds of pounds over the course of the last few months without other horses being infected or without any other symptoms. The vet hasn't been here yet, but I think we will discover that they become well with a simple course of adequate nutrition. 

The moral of the story: If you have a horse at a stable, be careful in these hard times, because perfectly decent people are cutting corners and are missing things (like that two out of the twenty-five or so horses at the facility are not doing well). You have to watch out for your own horses, no matter how much you are paying to have them cared for or how prestigious the barn is. (The barn in question has enjoyed a decent reputation, with only the normal amount of rumours surrounding it, up until now.)

The stable owner messed up. She is not a bad person, but she made a mistake, and it has hurt two innocent creatures and the people who love them. Other good people will make mistakes during hard times. We all need to support each other, but also when we do mess up we have to admit it and try to make amends.

From here on in, my focus is to get Bella and Rosie back to their glistening, happy, radiant selves.