A School Horse Legacy, Volume 1: ...As Tails Go By. Anne Wade-Hornsby

      Bene was never quick, but his strength carried the day. I had him for about 10 years. He was my first true equine love. I had two other horses before him, but in both cases, though I cared a lot for them, there were circumstances that made it clear they would not be horses that would end their lives with me. Bene did. He was never more than a passable school horse. He simply took too much leg, too much push, and way too much strength to control, for the average rider. He didn’t have a mean bone in his body, but I was the only rider who ever got any kind of controllable forward motion out of him. At the same event as our first, in San Diego, but five or six years later, we were on course going over a zigzag rail fence at the top of a knoll, the lowest thing on course, and Bene hit it, solidly, with his front feet--thwack! He had always done better over the high fences he respected. He didn’t so much as trip, and his feet stayed under him, we even finished the stadium handily, and placed second or third. He came up lame a few days later, with no swelling in the leg, so I took him to be x-rayed.

      Neither the vet nor I could believe he had not been a lot more lame a lot sooner. His “mule” hoofs, plenty big, but long and narrow as opposed to being roundish, had contracted heels that, in turn, had put pressure on other internal hoof structures enough that the blow at the cross-country fence had caused fissures that were not going to heal. His hoof structures were in pieces. He really was getting lamer by the day. I was ill. I left him there. My vet has back pens where you can go when you need to leave a horse. Writing this brings back the memory as if it were yesterday. We had lost Hashy not many months before, even had her replacement, but Bene was my first real competition horse.

      I had countless first places, I had proved all those people who called him coarse and unrefined wrong. In fact, today, they call them Warm bloods. When I got tired of telling people he was a Quarter Horse/draft cross, I just said Irish Draft and got oohs and ahhs. What Bene taught me was that you can go really far using what you were born with when you couple it with what you are good at and don’t let things spook you. I led him back and thanked him for his strength and willingness, his fortitude, and for the confidence he gave me as rider. We learned so much together, mainly because we both had so much to learn. He was strong enough and thick enough that I couldn’t ruin him, really. He just sort of plunged on through, and I was quite good enough to hang on. We were lucky to have each other. My heart was heavy indeed as I left him, but I also knew those crummy feet were a death sentence. He was contentedly munching hay when I gave him his last kiss and hug.