Horse Killing on Camp in the US - when summer camp became surreal.

This anecdote from my past needs a sense of humour, and a not too sensitive soul...

When owners of horses are economical with the truth...

So, now you’ve self-selected – here goes:

For the last elective placement on my training, we were allowed to sign up to work on a summer camp in the US, as long as it was one for some sort of ‘special needs’. So I got accepted as a ‘horseback riding specialist’ on a camp for young people and adults with learning disabilities and/or some sort of emotional disturbance. (For reasons that will become obvious later, the name and location of this camp will remain anonymous!). We were told by the Camp Directors that they struggled to find young Americans to volunteer on a special needs camp, and mostly recruited from Europe. Our camp counsellors and specialists were therefore one third British (English and Scottish), one third Dutch (Netherlands) and some American young people from the surrounding villages, and a French medical student. The anecdotes I could tell are endless, but I suppose I’d better stick to the horse related ones or it’ll turn into a novella…

The full-time live-in caretaker for the forest based camp premises was a huge man with a massive beard channelling the persona of ‘Grizzly Adams’. His five-year-old son already had a miniature (genuinely working) chainsaw of his own, and had a habit of running up to us with decapitated still-writhing copperhead (or should I say ‘no longer copper-headed) snakes, which he had caught and dealt with via his chainsaw.

Two days before the kids/older campers arrived, the horses were delivered. The other horseback riding specialist was a Dutch girl, Lotte, who had been specialist here three years in a row. When we received the horses, we found we that had been given one enormous one, well over sixteen hands, (Lotte said they’d never had such a tall one before), a tiny pony, and a medium-sized one that walked across the corral, bashed full-tilt into the fence on the other side, turned round and tripped straight over the water trough.

Lotte and I looked at each other, then turned to the owner of the trail riding stables they’d been hired from and said, “This horse is blind.”

“Oh, no, not at all!” the owner replied quickly.

Lotte pointed at the very long un-worndown and un-trimmed hooves. “You’ve clearly not been using it for trail riding for a while.”

“It’s just a temporary problem, it’s been having a few drops in its eyes, it’s fine. Here's the drops.” She shoved a small bottle into our hands and darted off.

Grizzly Adams came over with some super-sticky stable fly-paper and some tacks. “We put this up in the shed to try to lessen the nuisance.”

So Lotte and I got up on stools and she tacked in one end, and I tacked in the other end. She assured me that they did this every year. The other thing they did every year was run a competition to name the horses, so that the campers could all have a stake in them, so until the end of the first week they were just referred to as the big one, the blind one, and the little one.

Within a day of the campers arriving it became clear that the horse must definitely be blind, as whenever it came to a slight hill or hump it tripped over it. We dealt with this by always leading it everywhere, staying close to its head, and tapping its forelegs whenever we needed it to lift them higher to negotiate an obstacle or slight incline. Three days in, it got stung by a hornet and reared up and tried to bolt, throwing off the kid on it. Not surprisingly, the poor horse was nervous all the time.

So, day six. Tomorrow the new names of the horses were to be revealed. The whole camp was down at the lake, having the daily evening swimming session. Everyone was there to help out.

Suddenly a big shout went up, “The horses are out!”

Lotte and I, both in swimming costumes, rushed across the yard to see what was going on. What we saw was the big white one galloping across the grass in a massive panic with a huge streamer of fly-paper stuck firmly to its tail. It was so tall, it had flicked up his tail in the shed, got it stuck on the fly-paper, yanked it down, panicked because it didn’t know what was hanging on to its tail, galloped across the corral, and bust straight through the fence (which are always nailed from the outside in, so that horses can break out without hurting themselves if there’s a stampede). But of course the poor horse couldn’t get away from the evil monster hanging on to its tail and so just kept on galloping. With horses, who are herd animals, all fear is infectious. If one is panicking and running, there must be a good reason for it… ergo: they must be under attack. So galloping after the big white one, was the small one, and the blind one.

They reached the parked cars in the carpark. The big white one wove through them. The little pony wove through them. The blind one careered straight into them, reared up, came down on a bonnet and got its hooves stuck in there, whinnying and screaming. Lotte ran to rescue the blind one, and I shot off after the other two who were now plunging into the forest.

So somehow, in a swimming costume and bare feet (adrenaline is a marvellous drug), I was managing to keep up with two galloping horses, weaving between trees, jumping over rotting logs, darting around poisonous ivy, and leaping at least one alarmed snake who wasn’t sure which way to slither to get away from us all.

The two horses turned for home and headed back for the corral. They galloped back in. Grizzly Adams was ready with nails and a hammer and quickly hammered the struts back up. They proceeded to gallop round in panicked circles.

“Jump on the fly-paper!” Grizzly yelled at me (me, a skinny bitch in bare feet remember) and at another girl who had run over to help me.

I made a bit of an attempt that I wasn’t sorry to miss – because the only way I could see this ending up, was the spectacle becoming a huge horse galloping around the corral with fly-paper so sticky you could stick an elephant to it attached to its tail with me attached by the bare soles of my feet to the fly-paper, being dragged round after it like some human plough through the dirt.

Massive booted Mr. Grizzly leapt the fence and ran at the fly-paper and landed square on it. There was a huge yank on the horse’s tail, and the fly-paper tore off it.

Phew, thank God for that! I thought. Now that’s sorted we’ve just got one injured blind horse, and two basically okay, if shaken up ones. WRONG! The big white horse was so shocked it fell to the ground and had a massive heart attack and lay there thrashing about on the ground.

I rushed over to it and started CPR. I wasn’t even sure where a horse’s heart was, but I figured leaping up and down on its chest was my best bet. The other girl, an American called Madison, got the idea quickly, and gamely started blowing down the horse’s nostrils and into its mouth.

By now we had an audience of sarcastic males.

“This horse had better not die,” Madison declared. “I’m not French-kissing a horse for it to die!”

The horse stopped kicking and twitching. A Scottish medical student got out a torch and shone it into the horse’s eye. No response. “You might as well stop now,” he announced, “it’s definitely a stiffie…”

Wow – he’s going to be a doctor with a great bedside manner, isn’t he?

So, one dead horse, one injured one, and one okay one. WRONG!

The Camp Director had called the trail riding stable owner and the local veterinary. After consultation with the stable owner the veterinary advised that the injured blind horse be put down. I don’t think it was entirely necessary, as the legs weren’t broken, just badly cut up, but Grizzly Adams was earwigging in, and he told us after that the owner had tacitly admitted that the horse was blind. She told the veterinary that the horse had been no good for trail riding for a long time now, and that she’d have never sent it here if she’d realised what was going to happen. She told him to euthanise it. The veterinary (thankfully) told her that we’d done all the right things and that we couldn’t be held to blame.

So, now we had two dead horses and one live one, and we somehow had to get rid of the bodies before the kids all saw them in the morning. By now it was pitch black – and me and Lotte and Madison were still all in our swim costumes shivering and getting bitten by mosquitoes, walking around in bare feet in the hay where the copperheads lived and hissed at us every morning. We went and got some clothes on and came back out. The little pony had been sedated and Lotte and I took turns to set an alarm and come back out to check it once an hour all night.

The Camp Director hired a JCB digger which was timed to arrive at 6 am before the campers had woken up. At 6 am I was out there checking the little pony. Along with other staff who’d turned out for the show, I stopped to watch the hole being dug. It dug until it hit bedrock – which wasn’t far. Then a couple of the American lads hooked the bodies up to a pick-up truck by means of chains twisted round the legs in order to drag them to the hole. The bodies were already swelling with gas. The boys then set off around the estate at high speed, whooping and hollering gleefully, with the corpses bouncing and bubbling behind them. Finally, they were persuaded to dump the bodies in the holes. They put them in upside down with their hooves in the air. The JCB filled the earth back in over the top. But, oh, no, the hole wasn’t deep enough! When the last of the earth was replaced, there were still eight legs sticking stiffly out, four really tall, and four smaller. We all looked on in dismay.

“Why don’t you turn it into a feature?” someone helpfully commented. “Nail a board on the top of both of them and turn them into a picnic table and bench?”

I don’t actually remember what we did to sort it out as the campers were coming out of breakfast by then and we had to head off to divert their attention elsewhere.

And the surviving little pony? What did that get called for the rest of the summer? We suspended the competition – it was obvious what we should call him – we called him ‘Lucky’.

Postscript: I was known (unfairly) as ‘horse-killer Kyle’ for the duration of the camp (although maybe that’s preferable to ‘horse-kisser Madison’?), and the guy whose car had two enormous holes in the bonnet had great difficulty getting his insurance company to believe that a blind horse had mounted his car...