>...finally everyone had to concede that
she and I should get a turn to try to load our horses, too...we looked at each
other and walked our stallions into the trailer cheek to cheek--they both
travelled up to Auburn without so much as a single squeal.
Mel, your story reminds me of when we moved up here
to Idaho. I priced what it would cost to make multiple trips with our
3-horse with partitions to haul all the stallions and found it would be cheaper
to get a commercial hauler with a 10-horse slant-load to haul 10 at once.
The driver he sent over told me later that he thought his employer had lost his
marbles, sending him to haul 10 stallions without spaces in between, but after I
loaded them all with web halters and no chain without so much as a squeal, he
confessed his anxieties and told me he would not have believed it could have
been done until he watched me do it.
I then followed him in my car for the 600+ mile
trip, and in the middle of the moonless night, with temps below freezing
just short of Gilmore summit, he pulled over because he felt something wrong in
the trailer. We looked, and a partition had come loose, spooking one of
the young ones--and wouldn't you know it, I had tied him with a rotten bungee
that was in there, instead of with his lead rope, and he'd broken the bungee and
gotten up on his hind legs and pivoted, and was "mounted" across two adjacent
partitions and the rump of another stallion in between. In the initial
scuffle, two or three more partitions had come loose, but when we opened up, not
a one of them was saying a word or moving a muscle. We had to start by
taking the forward 5 out of a tiny escape door with a STEEP ramp (on which water
had spilled and frozen) down into the blackness right onto the highway.
The first one had a partition literally squishing his face to the wall, and the
driver had to pry it back while I got him out. All the young ones were up
front, and every one of them came calmly down the skinny little
ramp. The five older ones came out the normal way out the back so
that we could fix the problem. There were only two spots to which to tie
on the trailer itself, so we had stallions tied all over the place in the
adjacent desert--a couple of them to road signs, a few to a barbed wire fence,
one to a power pole--you name it, we tied to it. They all waited patiently
while we fixed the partitions, and every one of them clumped quietly and calmly
back in when we were done. Duration of problem--about two hours. I
sure was proud of my boys, and the driver was again shaking his head, saying he
would never have believed that could have been done with a load of
stallions...
