I have no words to describe the absolute devastation losing my horse has brought me. My poor boy, only twelve years old gone in the matter of 8 hours.

He isn’t the first horse I’ve lost, and unfortunately he ended up in the exact same stall at the exact same hospital when I lost my first heart horse to a similar situation. She was only 6.

Nothing prepares you to make that decision and sign those papers. To see surgery just sitting there and hear the odds and challenges of recovery and feel so absolutely selfish and cruel when I can’t take that path. Isn’t it my responsibility to give him everything I have? Because I know he wasn’t a show horse, he was a grade scruffy mutt who was rude and never learned a single manner, but he was the best horse I’ll ever own. He was the horse anyone could ride, who I took camping for the first time and completely changed me and my husbands ability to ride together and explore and now he’s just gone. In a single day every dream I’ve had is gone. And I have to watch my husband lose his very first horse, not fully understanding how or why.

We had to drive home with an empty trailer. Pull in to watch his brother just staring at the gate waiting for him to return and I am helpless knowing I can never ever explain to another animal why his friend is gone and he’s alone. I need to wake up and feed one less horse. He didn’t even call out for him. Just stood there waiting.

There are people all over the world who don’t love their horses. They monetize them or use them or abandon them. and those people get to have them for years. It is a joke to think that the world is anything but cruel.

I’ve been in the horse world for my entire life and I think this is it. I’d rather sell my last horse than watch him suffer in my cursed hands. I no longer have any heart left for this.