Max & His Colt

Registered Quarter Horse Stallion, liver chestnut, born circa 1965
QH chestnut colt born circa 1972

I first saw Max on a flyer at a local feed store. He was standing at stud & I was looking to breed my AQHA mare. His pedigree was old & today he'd be considered 100% foundation. He was liver chestnut & stocky. His legs were substantial & straight, his over all conformation was very nice, & his superb disposition was the final deciding factor to breed my mare to him. I didn't have a trailer so his owner rode him the 2-3 miles to the stable to breed my mare. He was a perfect gentleman. Unfortunately my mare didn't get pregnant so I wasn't to have a Max foal.

A couple months later I received a late night call from Max's owners. They had a 3 month old son by Max & he'd impaled himself on something in the yard. As was normal for the time, the owners kept their 3 horses in their backyard in a housing tract zoned for horses. There were a lot of these areas in S CA in the '60s & early '70s. Max's owners didn't have a regular vet & they didn't know what to do because the few they'd called refused to come out on a Sunday night for someone who wasn't a client. I rushed over to help, taking ice & towels. When I got there the colt was standing in their kitchen. To say he'd impaled his chest would have been an understatement. He had the largest, laid open injury I've ever seen in 45 years of horses. His entire chest was laid wide open & bone could be easily seen. The sickening sight was that we could see what we believed was his heart beating. I'll never know if we really did see his heart, but we did see all his tissue pulsating with each heartbeat. I called my vet, who ended up being out of town. Then I began calling every vet in the phonebook. No one would come out. We were applying pressure with the towels & had ice covering his chest to help keep the bleeding & swelling at a minimum. His owners finally said our only choice was to stitch him the best we could. When I asked how we were going to do that without tranquilizer or pain killers, they explained that they were ex-heroin addicts & on methadone. I was so shocked I'm sure they could read it in my face. They assured me they no longer used drugs & that the methadone would help us get the colt stitched. I'm not sure how many injections we gave him because we gave tiny doses until we felt he was tranquilized enough. I don't remember how long it took but I was there all night, sitting on the kitchen floor, stitching up a 3 month old colt. What an awesome colt. He certainly had Max's disposition. The sun was coming up when I left for home. Later on Monday the owners called to let me know their colt was doing well. They'd finally gotten a vet to come out that afternoon & the vet complimented us on a job well done. He said we'd saved that colt's life & he didn't think he could have done as well. They'd scoured the yard but never found what he'd impaled himself on. I never saw Max, his colt or the owners again. I regret that because it was my choice to distance myself once I found out they were old heroin addicts. Such a shame that I wasn't older & open minded enough to stay friends with them. They were good people who loved their horses.