A horse can grow a stone in its stomach the size of a grapefruit. I know because I saw one pulled from a slit open belly, the vet’s hands disappearing into the squiggle of guts and gore before emerging with the thing. Slick with blood and bodily slime, it looked like an alien egg.
When I dreamed of being a veterinarian as a child, I thought it would be puppies and kittens, holding droppers to the plastic eye of a stuffed animal, pressing a stethoscope to a soft chest, smoothing the fuzz on the top of their heads. But then I fell in love with horses, the sheen of their coats, the intricacies of their muscles, their power. I trained to become a large animal vet because I wanted to save them. I imagined I could preserve them like the plastic model horses lining my bookshelf, the ones posed with arched necks, manes blowing in the wind, legs frozen mid-gallop.
Of course, it’s nothing like that. When I interned at one particularly inept hospital, a horse died, and so I supervised as a crane lifted the body out of the stall. But then one of the gears caught, and a rope snapped, and I had to dodge a thousand pounds of horse flesh clabbering to the ground. It’s actually like that.
Horses can die in so many ways. Old age and getting tangled up in fences and stepping on a nail and falling off the edge of a trail into a ravine and flipping over backward and crushing the bones of their delicate legs—and that’s just the horses I’ve known.
For example: When horses get stomach aches, they can’t throw up. And so their pain worsens and worsens and that’s called colic and it can kill them, their insides all twisted up and pulsing and bubbling. Imagine dying like that.
When I was sixteen, my parents bought me a horse named Elvis, named for the thick, dark forelock that cascaded over his eyes. My friend showed me how to hold my ear to his flank where hairlines met in a geyser. Listen for gurgling, she said. That’s how you know their bellies are at work, digesting mounds of forage. No alien eggs roosting there, no twisted guts.
I held my ear to Elvis’ barrel every day for years, as I graduated high school and then college and then vet school. This low growl a small reassurance in a world devising to kill him.
He died anyway. Euthanized after we discovered a degenerative disorder that crystallized the segments between his vertebrae. His spine was slowly stiffening into a plank.
Did you know? A horse must be able to lay down, must be able to rise again. Otherwise, blood will pool in the incredible heft of their bodies and they will, yes, die. And it happens fast, in a matter of hours.
And so—instead of Elvis growing ever more uncomfortable until he got down one day and couldn’t get up—we took him to his stall with soft bedding and let him drift to sleep. Instead of one kind of death, another. A kindness, I suppose. Though it didn’t feel like one.
What are you supposed to do with a horse? Why are they built this way? It seems wrong, an accident of evolution. My task as a vet, Promethean.
Horses are meant to graze all day, and their guts contain acid—so, so much acid—to break down that constant supply of food. But we can’t feed stabled horses as often as they’d eat in the wild. We throw wide flakes of hay sheafed from the bale and scoop grains dried and pelleted, but horses should be tearing off bits of grass all day, like how I rip corners off my bagel so I don’t smear cream cheese on my chin, so that their bodies are always digesting.
The point is: Their stomach eats away at itself until it burns holes into that precious pink lining. I’ve seen many horses with tubes shoved through their noses and down their throats, equipped with a tiny camera to observe their insides. Their stomachs looked like the moon landing, cratered and craggy.
A horse eats itself from the inside.
Still. I try, I try. I glove up and disinfect and comfort and duck angry hooves and slip sedation needles into their jugular and tell them I’m sorry and repair their broken parts when I can and, when I can’t, stay up late reading anatomy books to try to drown out the thoughts, to try to do better tomorrow, to try to understand. I try, I try.
But how do you save something like that?
Lexi Pandell is a writer from Oakland, CA. Her short stories have been published by Wired, New Ohio Review, Queen Mob’s Tea House, The Museum of Americana, Peatsmoke Journal, Akashic Books, and others. She is the founder and facilitator of Desert Salon, an annual writing retreat in Joshua Tree, CA. She was a 2020 Writing by Writers fellow. In 2022, she was awarded the Editors’ Prize in Fiction from New Ohio Review. She is currently at work on a novel-in-stories.
Photo by withdarkshades