6 Introducing Lace!
I had bought my new part arab pony, I just had to get her home…
Lace had never been on a float (what we call horse trailers in New Zealand), she had travelled from Auckland to Ngatea by transporter. Kerry therefore thought it would be a good idea to get a commercial truck to collect her. Because George was settled in to his three months rest alone, I decided it was a good idea not to disturb that by introducing a new horse… so she was going to the Armstrong’s for the first few months.
So on Monday I rang a horse transport firm, one horse, Ngatea to Whatawhata, ASAP. “We’ll get back to you”. I waited.
On Wednesday I rang them again, “Friday”. “So I waited three days for you to tell me you can’t do it until Friday?”
I rang another firm, “We’ll get back to you”. I waited…. Not so long this time…. And rang again. Friday. Ok well now Friday was pretty close. “We’ll get back to you with time etc.”
It was December. It was Thursday evening. I was at the work Christmas dinner, stressing about the fact that tomorrow a truck was supposed to pick up my horse from an address they didn’t know, and take it to another address they didn’t know, at a time unspecified…. WTF??? I ring again, no answer. I ring the 0800 number and get the boss… the driver is sick. The boss rings the driver, the driver’s partner rings me, he’s really sick, can’t do Friday, has races on Saturday. Really??? This whole truck idea was supposed to make it easier. By the way, if you’re dealing with these people… they NEVER ring you back!
So I decide that we’ll plan to spend most of the day on Saturday taking the float over and get her ourselves. Allow plenty of time to get her on the float and keep her calm. My partner, Bill, comes too, mainly for moral support as he was completely non-horsey, but he did do all the driving.
It all goes relatively well, Lace loads in less than an hour, we successfully negotiate the nasty, rickety bridge over a huge ditch with a tight turn too soon after it and we’re on our way home. Bill is a bit nervous, “Is it ok? I can’t tell”. “When something goes wrong in a float you know about it” I say.
Not five minutes later we know about it alright. Bang, crash and the whole car is rocking. It’s raining now but we stop in the middle of the road and jump out. The front window is smashed. I open the small side door for a look, “We’ve got a problem and I don’t know what to do”. Bill takes a look, “I don’t know either”. Lace had jumped over the front bar, she was hanging with the bar just in front of her back legs, her back hooves barely touched the floor. There was a substantial cut to her nose.
It is raining very hard.
We examined the float more closely and discovered to our relief that the front bar was not welded in but bolted, and what’s more (all praise and blessings on the people who made that float) the bolts were stainless steel so were not corroded! But we had no tools.
So we stopped a random chap in a ute (pickup truck, ute stands for utility vehicle)… he had a six inch adjustable spanner. We set about undoing bolts. Then one bolt started turning on the inside, and of course it was on the far side of the float. We stop another random car, an older man and his wife on their way to a funeral… but he has a six inch vice grip. So now all I need to do is get to the inside of the bolt… past an unknown horse who is frightened, in pain, and wedged into a very tight spot! As I go in she comes at me with her mouth wide open, I grabbed a handy bandage and stuffed it in her mouth! Then very carefully and slowly climbed up onto the bar and over the top of Lace to reach the bolt on the far side. Bolt undone! Now, get back before the bar collapses! Success, the bar hangs there for a little and then she moved slightly and it fell down… and she didn’t panic.
So now we have a horse in a demolished float – at least the inside was, the structural parts of the float were undamaged – and it’s still absolutely bucketing down with rain. My plan was that if we could get a vet Lace could be sedated and we might be able to remove the broken partition and front bar without having to take the horse out on the side of the road… I didn’t like my chances of getting her back in again! The guy on the way to the funeral said that the vets in Ngatea had their phone number on the window and that he would drop his wife off at the funeral and go and ring them for us… aren’t people fantastic? So before long a vet turned up for a look on his way past (he needed to go to work to get drugs) and we discussed the plan. He was worried if she was sedated she might fall over in the float on the way home, but I convinced him we would only do enough to get the stuff out safely. He returned soon with drugs and a friend to help. Amazingly we managed to get the whole partition and the T shaped breast bar out through the tiny half door. It was actually really hard to get Lace to move at all, combination of drugs and frightened I think. Then we cross-tied her and hoped that she would not try to jump out the window again!
We still needed a vet when we got home to sew her nose up, but once again we were on our way…
She kicked once near Morrinsville, I think that may have been when the drugs wore off. I talked to Kerry, she was at a Christmas party but was able to organise a vet to be at her place shortly after we got there. More drugs and some stitches while sheltering under the door of the garage – it was still heaving down with rain – and my pony was home.
