While he looked good, his vitals were okay, and his activity level remained normal, he went on a hunger strike. For some reason, he decided that, for about 24 hours, he didn't want his pelleted senior horse feed. He still grazed, and he still gummed hay (his molars being long gone, all he could do was mash the hay into wet cuds and then spit them out), but the pellets were unappetizing.
Then, after a day of turning up his nose, he began to eat them again, although not nearly as much as he needed to since they really were his only sustenance what with not having teeth to masticate the grass and hay with. Some days he ate 1/2 his serving per feeding, other days he ate maybe 1/4.
This went on for a few days. And then came the last day. He ate only a few bites of his breakfast, and the barn owner called to tell me. I went out to check on him as soon as I was done with work, around noon. With the exception of flared nostrils and somewhat heavy breathing, he looked and acted normal. He didn't even look like he was losing any weight despite having cut his daily intake drastically for five days. For good measure, I took his temperature (oh the humility! The rudeness! The indecency!), which was in the normal range, ruling out illness.
I was about to go home for some lunch, with the plan of returning in a few hours to check on him, when suddenly he seemed to be having a hard time breathing. His inhalations got very loud. His eyes got alarmed, and his body language changed. He went from calm to looking very agitated. He came trotting up to me, stopped, almost lay down, then stood upright again, his sides heaving.
He paced, his breathing becoming louder and louder. I called the vet. When he'd first gone off his feed the week before, I had told myself that if I needed to call the vet, I would be putting The Old Man to sleep. But hearing him now, and seeing how distressed he had become, I knew it was time. I couldn't wait to see what happened, let him go for hours and see if he got better. This didn't look or sound (especially sound!) like it was going to go away on it's own.
The receptionist at the vet's office could hear The Old Man's breathing through the phone, even though when I called I was standing probably 12 feet away from him. She immediately looked up which vet was on a call closest to my area, and called them. Within 20 minutes, the familiar red truck with the white vet box pulled into the driveway.
By this time, The Old Man was literally roaring each time he tried to draw a breath. He was also staggering, having a hard time staying up right. Less than two minutes after the vet laid eyes on him, she was retrieving the euthanasia kit (a giant syringe of the pink juice the vets use on horses) from that white box. He was already on his knees before she even inserted the needle into his jugular. It was clearly time to ease him out of this life.
I had no regrets about ending his life. He was clearly in distress. I do wish that I'd done it perhaps a few days sooner, and avoided whatever it was (pulmonary embolism?) that had made him incapable of breathing in the end.
The Old Man
April 1984 - August 2018
a very old horse indeed
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