With A Heavy Heart

Things have been exceptionally hectic around here these last few weeks, so I haven't had much time to blog. This morning I was walking around taking pictures of all of the projects going on and planned on doing a rather long post to fill everyone in on all the happy stuff.

Instead, I am very sorry to say that instead, I have to say Rest In Peace to Turk...

As you all know, Turk has been a project horse. For the last year and a half, I have worked on getting him sound again. Due to a massive injury to his right front foot when he was a young horse, I have had a lot of experimental type shoeing done on him to see if we could rectify a floating heel bulb. Although his foot came a long way, it did become apparent to me that he was probably never going to be completely right and at best would be a light riding horse. My mom and I have had several discussions these past few weeks about what exactly we were going to do with him. Taking him back to SD was not an option due to the fact he needed those front shoes and they needed to be reset every 4 weeks. Can't even find a decent farrier in our neck of the woods in SD, much less one that is reliable enough to come reset shoes every 4 weeks. Without the shoes, Turk would have gone back to being completely unsound, in pain and inevitably his front-end would have given out.

The damn thing of it is, the horse has always been accident prone...note the bandage...

If anybody was going to get into something they shouldn't or get hurt...he was the one. Unfortunately poor Turk used up his 9-lives this morning and I had to put him down.

I still have not really figured out how he did what he did, but he was in the pasture with Spooks, Bugs and Jet. Moon and Frosty were in pens waiting for me to clean them up for my trip this weekend, so I know that it was not a fight between Moon and Turk. Anyway, I saw horses at the tank this morning when I left to get work done on my trailer, when I came back, they were all at the far end of the pasture. That's normal. Turk was off by himself. That is also normal. I get a knock at the door with an unfamiliar lady telling me they were working on their fences and noticed my Paint horse had some blood on his leg and wasn't standing on that leg.

Already sick to my stomach at her words, I grabbed a halter and ran up to where Turk was. There wasn't much blood and although the gash in his leg looked horrible at first glance, by the time the vet got here, I realized the gash wasn't that bad. I knew the vet would be putting him down though. He had fractured the high motion joint (the front of the hock). The vet confirmed what I already knew in my heart. The chances of that ever healing right...very slim.

I called my mom. After all, Turk was her horse and I thought she should have the final say. She agreed putting him down was for the best, so that's what we did.

Rest In Peace Turk...You had hard-luck in this life, but you were a pretty nice guy in spite of it all....