The Grim Reaper

Three years ago today, my beloved little Arab horse chose to gallop off with a buck and a kick into the next world. He was getting old and despite being spritely and fit I was all too aware that his time was coming. Not through anything that had happened to him, just because nothing and no-one lasts forever.

Little Arab lay down and made it clear that he was in immense pain and could I call the Vet as soon as bloody possible. And despite the best equine Vet in the country working her hardest, it was obvious that he was not going to get better and I made the decision that we should put him to sleep. It wouldn’t have been fair to have put him through an operation and I certainly didn’t have the funds to do it. So instead we took him quietly up to his field and I fed him carrots and pieces of Mars Bar as the lethal liquid was injected. In seconds, my glossy bay Arab created by Allah, horse of fire, was still and silent on the grass, out of pain and in the next life, pieces of chocolate still in his mouth.

Now this horse had not lived his life aiming to please those who are faint of heart. He was what you would call a 1000% horse as he was either running with his engine on maximum revs or he was asleep. He was very kind to my daughter but only after I’d reprimanded him for snapping at her ponytail with his huge teeth as she cycled her plastic tricycle past his stable door. In one of the last dressage competitions I took him to the judge wrote on my score sheet that he was “a very nice little horse, could do a very good test if you can get him to settle more to the job”. I felt like writing back to her, telling her that I’d been trying for over twelve years to get him to settle more to the bloody job. But that was him in a nutshell. If he found something a bit dull he would provide his own entertainment to liven things up. He was terrified of anything on the public highway that weighed more than 3 tonnes. This was a bit of an issue during the harvest when every damn thing on the road is a tractor. (I won’t even mention the day when we met the combine harvester – I had to lie in a darkened room for four hours after that one.) So in the way the horse lived, it was fitting that he chose to fatally colic on a Bank holiday weekend meaning that I had to pay the Vet and Out of Hours call out fee. The Arab would have loved that.

I chose to have his life ended by an injection instead of a gun for my sake and this meant than when my four year old daughter asked to see him, I didn’t hesitate and took her by the hand up to the field. Each to their own and some people will think this is wrong, but I wanted her to understand that sometimes it is kinder to stop an animal suffering with death rather than prolong the agony and that death is not always a horrible thing. She helped to cover the body with a tarpaulin and gave him a pat, a stroke and tried to close his eyes. The next day she saw the carcass being removed by a JCB and delivered into a hole in the ground and she came with me to scatter grass seed on the bald earth a few days later. He was a very special little horse and if educating a child about death was in main purpose in life then I’m delighted to have known him. The rosettes were obviously just a bonus.