ungratefulness

This morning I am heavy with exhaustion, disoriented with sadness.

No sleep last night. My head felt so heavy and full. Filled with lead. Insomnia is a plague that never leaves me. I can't remember what it feels like to feel rested.

And I received some upsetting news. I know I've been writing about horses lately; it's hard not to when they're right outside my window, and I interact with them every day. It has been enriching to get to know them, learn about their individual personalities, scratch their fuzzy foreheads and warm my cold hands on their warm breath.

We have one horse who is completely blind in one eye and slowly losing vision in the other. His bad eye has died and is shrinking back into the socket, seeping pus. I don't know how much pain he's in. It's hard to tell with him: he is just a doll. Even with his limited vision, he is never easily startled. He is quiet to work around, and often approaches me in his pen to be scratched. He has been here for as long as I can remember, carting kids around like a saint for at least a decade, probably more. I don't even think he's been off the property in all that time. The vet says that once his vision goes completely in the other eye, there is a great chance that he will panic, gallop terrified around his pen, running into fences and seriously hurting himself.

I want to call a vet to put him down. It's the most humane thing to do. I understand that animals are animals, and that all life has an end.

Instead of paying for a dignified end to his life of service, those in charge have decided instead to get some money for him by selling him at auction, where he will inevitably go for meat. He is old and blind -- no one with kind intentions is going to buy him. He'll get a per-pound price, and he will be loaded into a stock trailer with a dozen other horses and taken to slaughter. He will be terrified to the last second of his life. I cannot even bear to think of him there.

Last night I cried for half an hour, knowing that today is the day. This morning, I brought him an apple and stood for a long time in his snowy pen, hugging him. With my face buried in his mane and my fingers woven into his soft winter coat, I breathed in his scent, one so familiar. Horses smell like sweet hay, mostly, mixed with something else like smell of earth. He was ever patient, standing quietly while I clung to him. I thanked him for everything he's done for us, and told him I was sorry about how we were repaying him. Even though he doesn't understand me, I told him everything will be okay. He looked at me out of his good eye, breathed his sweet hay breath into my hair. Tears came to my eyes again.

Now I'm watching him out of my office window. I've left him in to free-feed off a big round bale all day. He goes this afternoon, and I don't know when his next chance to eat will be. I want him to at least be full and comfortable when he leaves.

I wish I wasn't here for this. That if it had to be done, it could have been done sometime when I was away. So that I wouldn't have to load him onto the trailer myself, be the one to send him away. The others think I am too sensitive. Tell me he is not a person; he's only a horse. I'm not a child -- I understand that he's not a human being. But he has a personality, he feels comfort and excitement and fear. He feels pain. He has the capacity to interact with people, to be sweet to kids who have hauled him around his whole life. He has the capacity to be afraid at the end of his life.

I wish I could be in charge of this decision. I would do everything so, so differently. Instead of ungratefully discarding him at some slaughterhouse, I would put him out of his pain in comfort here in his home, where he has spent most of his life and deserves a dignified end.

Afterwards, life will go on. I won't be upset forever. There are so many other horses. So much in my life to think about besides this one particular horse. But today I am sad, and so tired, and ill-equipped to deal with this one gruesome fact of death and money.