A story for the seasonChristmas never seems to matter to horses. I think it may be their way of getting even for a perceived slight about 2,000 years ago. In all the manger scenes I have ever seen, there are cows, sheep, camels, donkeys, even a dog in one I saw, but no horses. I think the fact that many choose December 25 to get sick or hurt is not coincidental.
A friend of mine was the resident veterinarian on one of the larger breeding farms and each year he would take the last two weeks of December to visit the folks back home. In his absence, the horses on the farm still needed veterinary care and this is where I came in. The workload of an equine veterinarian is usually pretty low at the end of the year, so I covered for him when he took off. It gave me something to do and it allowed him to get away, so it worked out well for both of us.
I was not wild about the Christmas day stuff, however, and it always happened. At least one horse on this farm would need my attention, as well as one or two others around the countryside. This particular Christmas morning I had received only one call. A mare at this farm had aborted overnight. Moreover, she had been sutured and tore.
The farm owned or boarded more than 300 mares and stood about 20 stallions. On entering the farm, the first barns you encountered were the two stallion barns, then, by following the farm road, you came to Barn 3 about a quarter-mile away, and, as you drove deeper into the farm you would come upon Barns 4, 5, 6, and so on. By the time you got back to the upper teen-numbered barns, you were well into the vast acreage that made up the operation.

The call
At 6:30 a.m., Chris Woodside, the assistant farm manager, called. "Doc," he began, "I'm sorry to call you on Christmas but a mare slipped this morning. She needs attention but I think she can wait a little while if you want to open your presents first."
I thanked him for his consideration and told him I would be there in an hour or so, then we let the kids wreak havoc unwrapping their gifts. Around 7:30 a.m., I left my wife to assemble toys and install batteries and I headed off.
Chris had said Barn 21. The higher the number of the barn, the less that went on there. Most of the barns had from 16-to-24 stalls and with 300 mares there were very few horses beyond Barns 15 or 16. I had never been as far back as 21 before and when I got there, I found it to be an old 12-stall barn which housed four late-foaling mares.
The mare that aborted was a Chilean import named Esmeralda. She had been one of the last mares bred the previous breeding season, her final cover coming on the third of July. Most sutured mares aborting before six months would not tear much, if at all, but Esmeralda, evidently realizing that I needed something with which to occupy my day, did a bang-up job of splitting open. She tore in a "V," sideways through the suture line and up around both sides of her rectum. Repair was no big deal, but it would be a little time-consuming.
As I replaced her divots with the aid of the skeleton holiday work crew, the kid who had driven the muck wagon out to be dumped came into the barn.
"Mr. Woodside," he said to Chris, "there's a horse out there."
Chris looked at him. "Billy, this is a horse farm, you know."
"Yessir," he replied, "but I don't think this one belongs."
"Is it loose?"
"No sir, it's in a paddock."
Chris told him he would check it out as soon as we finished with Esmeralda. That took another ten minutes and then Chris and I chatted a little as I cleaned my instruments. Billy stood by, fidgeting nervously.
Finally he interrupted. "Mr. Woodside ..."
"Oh, okay, Billy. Sorry. Show me this horse that doesn't belong."
"It's out back here." He pointed and led the way. I went along.
About 40 feet behind Barn 21 was a large, long, overgrown hedge, broken by a gap about ten or 12 feet wide through which an old, unused path ran. Fresh tractor marks in the dead grass showed that this was apparently where Billy had driven the muck wagon.
Billy led us through the gap and behind the hedge was a small paddock, maybe two acres in size.

The foundling
"Look there," said Billy, pointing to a horse in the paddock.
"Horse" is what it was, but barely. Standing in the middle of the paddock was a veritable scarecrow of a horse-a tall bay with prominent hip bones and all ribs and backbone showing beneath a weather-beaten hide, and a long, matted mane. It did not have a halter.
"Holy cow!" exclaimed Chris. "Billy, run to the barn and get a halter and shank."
Billy trotted off and Chris and I entered the paddock. The top hinge on the gate came loose from the rotted wood and the gate fell over rather than swinging open. The horse raised its head and looked at us, then dropped it again. We walked toward it and it just stood there. Chris bent down and looked under the animal's belly. "Doc, this is a stallion!" he announced.
I had been looking around the paddock. It was winter so there would be no real grass, of course, but even considering that, this place was terribly overgrazed. There was an old metal water tank-empty. The bottom was rusted out. "Chris," I said, "there's no water in here."
He looked around, too. "There's no water and there's nothing to eat. He must drink from there." He pointed to a small ditch running through the low end of the paddock. He was probably right; water would run through there when it rained or after a thaw.
"And look at those feet, Doc." All four hooves were horrible-in some places there were two-inch long pieces of hoof sticking out and in others the hoof was broken off to nothing. There were several inch-long cracks in the walls.
Billy returned with the halter and shank. The horse did not move as Chris slipped the halter over his nose and buckled it. He hooked the shank to it and began leading him toward the gate. The horse followed along, slowly. Very slowly. It took about five minutes to cover the 40 yards from the gate to the barn. Chris placed him in a stall and told Billy to toss him a flake of hay. The horse dived into it.
Jerry, the young man working in the barn, gaped at the sight. "Gee whiz, Mr. Woodside, where did that come from?"
"I have no idea, Jerry, but I'm sure gonna try to find out."
Chris had been employed by the farm for nearly three years. He had been hired when old Mr. Henderson retired. Mr. H, as everyone called him, had been the manager for years and, on his retirement, Roger Mitchell had been moved up to manager. Roger had been Mr. H's assistant for about three years. As so often happens, Mr. H passed away within a few months of his retirement. Chris said this was the first year since he had been employed there that they had had horses as far back as Barn 21.
"Doc," Chris said, "he needs something. Go ahead and do what you want. I'm going to call Roger and see what he knows about this." He went to his truck to call the farm manager from his mobile phone.

Examination
I had Billy hold the horse and I drew a couple of blood samples. The hay intake had stirred a little gut activity and he passed a few small, hard, dry fecal balls. I picked up a couple in a plastic sleeve so I could examine them for parasite ova. Being certain he was full of them, I decided to worm him with a mild paste wormer. He was a tall horse, more than 16 hands, and should have weighed 1,200 pounds but I estimated his weight to be closer to half that. He was so thin and emaciated that the outlines of the bones in his legs and skull were evident. In order not to cause an intestinal blockage by dead parasites, I only gave him a 400-pound dose of wormer. He could have more later.
I looked at his teeth. I am not real proficient at aging a horse in this manner, but I guessed that he was at least in his late teens.
Jerry brought a bucket of water.
"Pour out about three-quarters of that, Jerry, " I directed. "We don't want him to have too much too soon."
The horse inhaled it and went back to his hay.
Chris came back. "Roger doesn't know anything about this guy. He said he'll be right over." Roger lived on the farm, so it would not take him more than ten minutes to get there.
I told Jerry to give him another quarter bucket of water. He inhaled that, too. His hay was gone and Billy was tossing him another flake when Roger drove up.
"Merry Christmas, everybody," Roger greeted us. "What do we have?"
Chris told him all we knew. Roger looked at the horse.
"That is one sorry-lookin' critter," he said. "I think the last time we used this barn was the year before Mr. H retired. I guess that's three or four years ago. I don't know why a stallion would be back here."
"Is he a teaser, you think?" asked Billy.
"Yeah, probably," Roger answered.
Chris checked the horse's lip. "No tattoo," he said.

Farm records
When the farm office opened the next day, Roger and Chris had a secretary check the records of the teasers. They kept records on everything. The farm had five teasers at that time because of the large number of mares they had and the records of these five were there, as well as the records of more than a dozen other teasers the farm had previously used.
If a teaser was no longer in use, the record was noted with the final disposition of the horse: "Dead" and the date or "Sold" and the date or "Donated" and the date.
On the records of two there were no exact final dispositions. On one it said "Retired" and was dated 14 years before but it did not say what was done with him on his retirement. He was a bay Throughbred-cross named Armor and he would have been in his 30s at this point.
On the other, the record said nothing. He was an unraced bay Thoroughbred named Sorby and he would be 22 now. The last recorded entry on his record was when he had been wormed five years before. This must be him, they decided.
Evidently when Barn 21 had been last used, he was put back there to tease the mares. And when the mares moved out, he was just forgotten. For five years he was on his own in an overgrazed, underwatered paddock hidden behind a large hedge behind an unused barn. The back of the farm had been mowed, of course, but the people who do the mowing are not usually among the most clever, so if he was seen in those years he was ignored. After all, that paddock did not need to be mowed.
One possible explanation for the forgetting of Sorby: Except in management positions, horse farms have a large and sometimes quick turnover of employees. The person in charge of Sorby may have quit or been fired on the day Barn 21 had been taken out of use five years before.
Just in case Armor was still around somewhere, Roger assigned a complete search of the back half of the farm. No other lost horses were found.
Old Sorby, if that is indeed who he was, responded well to a little TLC and groceries. My friend took over his veterinary care a week later, of course, but he kept me posted on his progress. By spring he looked like a horse again. He was past his days as a teaser but Roger and Chris figured the farm owed him something. He was moved up front to the second stallion barn and given his own paddock. They treated him just as they did the valuable breeding stallions until he passed away quietly three years later.