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Beautiful animals. Thanks for sharing their stories! This was a nice read today.Hello horsey people! I have a very, very long pony post I've dutifully kept for pony sundays. I will include some photos to make it less tedious and I suggest people who don't particularly like horses just skip it. I would like to tell you two stories of the three horses we have in our village ; I think both stories have a sort of lesson about humans relationship to animals (though I'm not sure just what it is exactly).
Story of Gribouille and Momma
About ten years ago, when I began coming on weekends with my partner to his father's family old house on top of the village, I was surprised to discover that on a vale across a small stream, two horses lived left completely to themselves. They were in a beautiful clearing next to an abandoned house that they used as shelter, with a small canal running through the clearing. This place is reached only on foot, it's about a 45 mn walk from the nearest place where you can get a car, going down to cross the stream and then up the forest a 400 m elevation gain. They stood there all year round, without any visible human care or intervention.
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It took me several years to get the exact story of how these horses had landed there. They came from a riding center in a town 40 km away, and once they reached old age, were retired, or abandoned depending on how you view things, in that place with the agreement of that place's owner's family. I learned that they had been three but one died shortly after arriving of an infection nobody took care off. The black male was named Gribouille, he is now nearly 30 years old ; the brown mare with the white marking on her face we kept calling momma because no one knows her name anymore and she is 34 now.
These horses of course never get any medical care, or see a farrier. We have only one local vet and she doesn't even agree to come by car to our village, so there is no way to get her up there. Claude, a 75 yr old man who lives in the nearest place to where they are, comes up every day to give them stale bread. Since I moved here three years ago I have been bringing them a kilo of pellets once a week. And that's it. They have survived more than ten years like this. The mare is blind from one eye, she can't hear and she has so much arthritis she stumbles when she moves, Gribouille is in better shape. In winter 2020 there was so much snow, that I didn't go up there for a whole month, one needed snowshoe as there was 80 cm of fresh snow. I was sure the mare would be dead, but she survived. Claude, the man who feeds them stale bread, said he had managed to come three times a week using an ice ax and that his family had called him a lunatic.
I believe it is now only a matter of months when either him or I will find her dead. I can't make my mind up whether they had a beautiful end of life or a terrible one. Most riding club horses end up at the slaughter house.
Here are a few photos taken over the years :
Feeding pellets
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My partner climbing up the pear tree to get them some while they wait impatiently.
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Today :View attachment 3118309
Story of Siyou
This will be much shorter as I only met Siyou two weeks ago. Sometimes in april we had a discussion with a young guy who recently moved to live permanently in the village, his family's place, much like us. We said we were thinking of getting ponies and he replied that his girlfriend loved horses and also wanted one. We thought this was good news as it would make it easier, like I said in a previous post, to find a farrier, a vet, a good hay provider and so on.
Maybe a week later he texts my partner and says they have have been in touch with a horse rescue association, and have fallen in love with a horse, Siyou, and he's arriving in three days.
So the next day after Siyou's arrival I run up the mountain in the morning to see the horse and them. It turns out they have fallen for Ken (you know, Barbie's boyfriend) and brought him up in the wilderness ! Siyou is a beautiful 5 years old stallion with Arabian blood that was bred for endurance but didn't have the heart. He has never lived outside a stall and a paddock. He needs shoeing, he stumbles on rocky paths, and he has thrown himself on the green spring grass like crazy because he has never seen anything like it in his life! And now he is in a pasture 1300 meters high, between the highland cows pasture and the goats, where the wolves pack hang out in winter
Luckily his new owner does know what she is doing. She had a farrier come, she is walking him an hour every morning and every evening to avoid colics, she got him a dewormer even though our local vet wouldn't sell it to her. It will turn out all right but I can't help thinking the rescue association was a bit light on this one. Of course they wanted him to avoid the slaughterhouse which was a possible outcome.
What happened to the original owners who bred a stallion and abandoned him so fast, I can't imagine.
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Have a nice Sunday everyone!
