06/03/2026
Today was one of the worst days in my life as a horse breeder.
Perhaps even the worst. I lost three horses today.
It started like any other day, where I get up and get my child ready for school like I've done for the last year or more. We chatter about all sorts of things while she eats and I pack her lunch, then I drive her to school.
The first sign of the kind of day this was going to be came when Rebecca, my right hand on the ranch, called to say that one of the farm trucks had died on her while she was checking pastures a few miles away. When she calls me, it's almost always something bad and/or emergent, since we communicate via text most of the time. When she told me it was just the truck, I actually thought "Better a dead truck than a dead horse."
Perhaps that was what did it.
When she called again, my guard was down because I thought it was just about the truck.
"Penny's c**t isn't right..." It was about the really great c**t by Colonels Chic out of an old Pepsi Max daughter that I had sold some years ago and recently got to buy her back. I was hoping for a keeper filly, but instead she had this really nice c**t.
My crew and I have all been working tirelessly for days now as a cold and incredibly windy rainstorm has settled in. We've been cycling mares close to foaling and some mares with newer foals through the barn to get them dry, which keeps them warm. See these babies can handle some cold - and they can handle some wet - but they can't handle cold & wet together. It's been nighttime temps close to freezing with a "feels like" that is actually below freezing. Whatever happened to this c**t to set him back, we couldn't save him. He was certainly cold but maybe something else was wrong with him, unfortunately it does happen from time to time that we lose one, with this many foals. We brought them home, took them into the barn and warmed towels, put blankets on him, used a hair dryer for warm air, milked the mare to try feeding him, but he just faded further and further, eventually descending into what looked like painful convulsions. He was knocking on deaths door. I helped him get there, so that he wouldn't be feeling that and making the sounds he was that showed he was in pain.
While he was dying in one stall of the barn, myself and the crew keeping our hands on him and talking to him, his mother standing over us, another mare was in the foaling stall working on foaling. One of my favorites, a mare I raised whose name is Promise. Promise is another daughter of my heart horse; Pepsi Max. We lost Pepsi back on a cold winter day in the mid 2000's, to a nasty colic, in the parking lot of a vet clinic where we were trying to save him. When he died there, my Mom covered me up with a horse blanket as I lay on his neck, sobbing uncontrollably and unable to leave him. He was the most magnificent minded equine partner I ever had, and I attribute his brain to be what "set the bar" for my measure of disposition now. I loved that horse and have worked to keep him in the ancestry of some of my breeding program all these years later. Promise was born after her sire died, and he'd sired hardly any fillies for some years before that. When I got to her shortly after she was born, she was still wet and so were my eyes.
I promised her that she'd never live anywhere else, and so, her name became Promise.
Turns out that Promise wasn't foaling because she had a uterine torsion. Uterine torsions aren't common, and they're not easy or inexpensive to try and fix. The foal inside her was likely already dead. I found all this out after hauling her an hour for a vet to check her and deliver this dreadful news to me. Take her to the nearest big clinic that can do surgery, he recommended.
Even though she was hurting, I asked Promise to get on the trailer for me, and she did. Promise was my riding horse for many years before becoming a brood mare, and we know each other pretty well. She would always do what I asked her to. Her mother was old Reba, a mare that lived her 34 years and my Mom and I used her for everything. Promise is special, being both by and out of Fleetwood favorites, and my riding horse for years. Special doesn't always mean savable though, as I learned that this surgery would be thousands and thousands of dollars to get a dead foal out, a chance the mare wouldn't make it, and if she did if she'd breed again, and all this on a 19 year old mare. I know someone reading this is going to say I should have tried anyway, but that's not the decision I made about how I'll spend money and manage my business. At the end of the day, with raising horses being all I do - no job in town - I have to consider all things as objectively as possible. I'm raising kids on my own and still working to protect my legacy here, none of which is inexpensive.
Today, I had to make the hard call to put Promise down with her foal still inside her. The part of raising horses that is so wretched really shows up at end of life. Decisions as to how and where and when can be almost overwhelming when your head and your heart both cry and plead and beg! for a way to make this option be not the only option. I brought Promise home, got a big bucket of oats and a method of dispatch, and took her to a prime coulee I know, with lots of green grass. I was physically and emotionally sick to my stomach. In the bottom of that coulee, I told her that I was sorry, that she was a good girl, that our promise had been kept to each other, and to go find her mom - and mine.... then I sh*t her in the head.
That's it. It ain't pretty. There's no little bow to tie in this story and make it less painful and sh*tty. I don't know how many horses I've been with at their end, and it doesn't get any easier. Just the dreadful truth of what a person making choices for a loved creature has to do. Today I lost three loved creatures. Today was hard on the legacy of Pepsi Max, it was hard on my hard working crew, and it was a formidable and heavy day for me.
I've got another close to foaling mare in the barn tonight, and I have to go check her. Sometimes all we post is the roses; but the real, hard life stuff is truth too. That's what today was, a story about a disastrous day and a Promise.
Rest in Peace, JAF PEPSIS PROMISE, 2007-2026.
