Bittersweet outcome in rescue of horses
BOXFORD - There was no telling how long the horses had been lying in the icy paddock just outside their stable when they were spotted before dawn. The cold ground had already made them stiff and hypothermic, too weak to move.
Scruffy, a thoroughbred, was 43 years old, ancient for a horse. Tia, a chestnut Anglo-Arabian, was 29. Weighing nearly 1,000 pounds each, the prospects for righting and saving them were grim from the start.
"We were all on the same page thinking these horses weren't going to make it," said Boxford Fire Chief Kerry Stickney. "My understanding from talking to the vet is that horses don't like lying on their sides for a long time. They were shivering to beat the band."
What ensued Monday, as dawn broke over Diamond Brook Farm, was a scramble by animal lovers, public servants, and heavy town-owned machinery to save two horses fallen in the snow. It took a team of nine firefighters, three public works employees, two police officers, a vet, and an animal control officer to help the friends and family of the horses' owners bring them to their feet.
The owner, Paulette Straub, urged everyone to keep trying, even as her veterinarian warned her that she might need to put the horses down.
"I believe animals should be given every chance, as should a person," Straub said yesterday. "You make every effort you can."
The drama began after 5 a.m. Monday when Straub's daughter, Erika, arrived at the stable to find Tia on the ground and Scruffy upset. Erika headed over to Scruffy to take him into the stable. But he fell, too.
Firefighters began arriving around 6 a.m. with a good sense of what they were up against. Late last year, a half-dozen Boxford firefighters, including the chief, took part in horse rescue training. In Boxford, a rural town 25 miles north of Boston, the number of horses and ponies, 257, far outpaces the number of stores, two.
The team set to work. First, the town's animal control officer determined that the horses' legs were not broken. Then firefighters wrapped more blankets around the horses that Straub's daughters had already tried to warm with blankets and space heaters.
Though horses prefer to be outside, even in the worst of weather, the cold was permeating their bodies as they lay on the ground, said the town's animal control officer, Helen Phillips.
"Warming is obviously the first issue," Phillips said. "If no one had shown up all day, they could have died."
She also worried about organ failure. Horses' own heavy weight bears down on their organs if they lie on their sides too long, Phillips said.
Firefighters set to work trying to coax the animals to their feet using harnesses and ropes. The horses wouldn't budge.
"They weren't cooperating with us; they were too cold," said Stickney, the fire chief.
The veterinarian provided a muscle relaxant to help them get moving and food and liquids for energy.
Then, the public works crew tried the backhoe. They wrapped straps around Tia, behind her front legs and in front of her hind legs, and hooked the straps to the backhoe's bucket. "Finally, she put some weight on her legs," said Stickney.
Once Tia was on her feet and stabilized to make sure she would not fall again, the crew used the same method on Scruffy. The operation took about three hours. But both horses were standing.
"I think we all learned, 'don't give up. Because if we had put them down, it would have been too bad," said Stickney.
But the happy ending took another turn the following day. After the Straubs remained concerned about Scruffy's leg, they got a horse ambulance service to take Scruffy for an examination at Tufts.
The news wasn't good: He had a shattered right elbow. He would need an operation that would take four or five hours. Even a young horse might not survive.
Scruffy - once a competitor at Suffolk Downs who survived later abuse by another owner - would not make it through this one. "They didn't feel it was a very good prognosis, so we had to make a very bad decision," Straub said.
Scruffy had to be put down, and Tia has to learn to live without her companion.
"It would have been much worse if we had lost both of them," Straub said.
Stephanie Ebbert can be reached at ebbert@globe.com. 