More Detective Work
As we stood there in shock waiting for the vet to decide what to do, Linda and I both asked my Fell Pony stallion Kinniside Asi, “How could you be so stupid?” Not wanting to call my pony stupid, I revised my admonition to “How could you do this to yourself?” Bruce and Linda and I have worked hard to make him a home here that has equine-friendly fencing, but he had opened a gate and let himself out and run a fence with a mare in heat on the other side. He had lots of fun for the first few minutes, but that all changed in a brief instant.
Linda’s admonition had its roots in the fact that Asi had not stood still to be haltered when we approached him during those first few minutes. Had he done that, or had the mare on the other side of the fence done that, the injury would never have happened. But neither of them made that choice. Sometimes I am amazed at the power of hormones.
The next day, with Asi in a hospital, I walked the fence line to try to understand what had happened. I found a section of fence with Asi’s mane and other hair in it, but my detective work did not reveal how the injury had happened. I began to wonder if I was giving Asi too much credit. Maybe his hormones had in fact caused him to lose his senses and not exercise any self-preservation. I prepared to go visit him two hours away, replaying in my mind the evidence I’d found as I drove. In addition to hair in the fence wire, I had also found numerous broken juniper branches. The juniper was bushy down to the ground, and it was over my head in height, so it was in that realm of being somewhere between a shrub and a tree. The fence disappeared into the juniper on one side and emerged on the other, but was invisible in between.
After a slightly longer night’s sleep than the first one when I’d spent most of the dark hours either on the road or watching Asi get stitched up, I went out to do more detective work. This second visit to the scene bore more fruit. I looked again at the hair in the fence and the broken branches on the ground, then I thought to part the juniper along the fence wire. Sure enough, obscured by the dense foliage, I found a metal fence post. My faith in Asi’s inherent intelligence returned. He could not have seen that fence post when he launched himself toward the mare through the tree, breaking branches as he went. His injury now made much more sense.
After being a poor detective with another pony’s injury a few days before, I took some satisfaction this time that I had figured out the sequence of events. Now I just have to work with my two young ponies on our catch-me game when their hormones are driving their behavior, so I have some chance of preventing something similar from happening again. Oh, and the gate Asi opened? Bruce had a safety put in it before I even got home from the hospital!
© Jenifer Morrissey, 2020