The Loco Horse

My friend, Dave, as a sort of kindly hobby, nurses sickly calves back to health.  Right now, he's tending six whitefaced runts.  He gets them from ranchers he knows along the Front Range near Augusta.  Some of the calves must be bottle‑fed.  Some require medicine.  The ranchers have no time for them, and their impatient mothers soon abandon them if they seem sickly.  So Dave takes them in as pets, more or less.

Dave took me out to see the calves in their cozy barn.  I patted their shoebox heads and told them they were pretty, though, actually, cattle are oafish and their shoeboxes mostly empty.  Not pretty at all.  Cattle, I think, are as caviar an acquired taste.

While feeding a handful of alfalfa to one of the calves, Dave told me about a horse he "put down" recently.  "Horse went loco on me," he said.  "Didn't know up from apple butter."

Dave is one of those people who never exactly looks you in the eyes when he talks.  He stares at the ground.  He watches his hands.  Whatever.  But you'll not find a man more sincere than he, not in this particular life.  When he gazed at the calf's flank and said, "laying down a horse is the hardest thing in the world," I knew he meant it.

Purple loco is lupine's cruel cousin.  Lethally toxic to most range animals, locoweed washes up into patches all along the eastern slopes of the Rockies, all along the plains.  Dave's horse apparently found one of those patches while out to pasture.

Normally, a horse will not eat locoweed, and will in fact graze all around the pretty flowers, leaving them standing alone. But every so often a horse will nip a morsel of loco while munching through the tall grasses.  From that moment on, the horse's world reverses itself.  Having tasted the locoweed, the horse will forsake all grasses and hays and will forage near and far, often frenetic, to find more locoweed, more sweet poison.  Sometimes a horse will starve to death while standing knee‑deep in grass.  They no longer hear the red‑wing blackbirds fluting from cattailed ponds.  They don't feel the wind in their long hair.  They feel only loco.

Though you can sometimes pen a horse that has ingested a small amount of locoweed and nurse them back to our forward world, if they find enough loco before you notice, they become 'loco' for good.  The best thing then is euthanasia: the happy death.

Dave's horse found plenty of locoweed.

By the time Dave captured and penned his horse, the damage was done.  His horse had forgotten how to drink water, and would submerge its whole head in the watering tub, doing nothing. Several times, Dave rushed out and yanked the horse's head from the water to keep it from drowning.  The horse no longer recalled the simple act of turning around.  Anytime the animal walked itself into one of the fence corners, it remained there, greatly agitated, unsure of the next move, like a chess player refusing to accept an obvious stalemate.  On a few occasions, the pitiful creature finally freed itself by falling over backward.  Plodding slowly about the pen, the horse thought only locoweed, its small mind purpled and craving—craving one more taste of the summer flower's sweet lunacy, craving until Dave gave it a death like a good wind fanning Timothy and bluebunch wheatgrass.  

-- Mitchell Hegman