01/01/2026
This is Nell. Today, she turns 35 in Thoroughbred years. Nell isn't in the rescue, she's my own horse that I've owned for most of the last 33 years. I have never ridden Nell. She's not very friendly, she isn't all that attractive, and she's hard to keep weight on. 33 years ago, my mom got a call from a Thoroughbred breeder about a horse they wanted to sell because she wasn't very fast at the track. (Spoiler alert: it wasn't Nell.)
My mom asked me to go with her to pick up said horse. When we arrived, the guy who was in charge pointed at a tiny speck on the far horizon and said, "That's her. She's pretty hard to catch. I'll go get the ATV and see if I can chase her down here." One might ask, "why did you not bring that horse in when you knew we were coming to get her, instead of leaving her out in a 100 acre field?" We didn't ask that. Not out loud, anyway. So, off he went on his ATV while we stood around. There was a pen off to the side with two horses in it, who both looked pretty sad and forlorn. We asked another guy there what the deal was with those horses, and he told us they were headed to the auction shortly. Upon further examination of these two, it wasn't exactly a mystery why. The gelding in the pen clearly had something very wrong with his neck. He couldn't hold his head straight at all. The man who told us about the auction trip said he had broken his neck as a weanling and it healed, but in such a way that he was sort of stuck looking at you from the side of his eye no matter where you stood. The other horse was this skinny little swaybacked creature who looked like she would like to jump out of the pen and run for her life. The fact that she had not one speck of athletic ability was probably the only thing keeping her in. You may have guessed, that was Nell. As my mom and I
gazed sadly at these two poor sad sacks, here came the other mare blasting in from the field with ATV man hot on her heels. She actually came running straight at us and had a halter on, so I just casually reached out and grabbed her. (Like I said, this was 33 years ago. Nowadays I'd probably watch her sprint past. Ah, the joy and stupidity of youth.) We had already committed to taking this horse, but then my mom and I looked at each other and said, "we should probably take those other two also, right?" Needless to say, we not only TOOK them, but PAID for the yearling with the broken neck and the swaybacked two year old. We are not bright people.
Amazingly, we found homes for all three of them. The mare who was hard to catch was actually a great riding horse and the yearling with the broken neck went to be a companion horse and lived into his twenties.
Nell went to a neighbor of mine, but that didn't work out, so back she came. Tiny, hot and swaybacked isn't really a recipe for a career, so she has just spent the last 33 years bumming around, giving me the side eye, and rejecting most forms of horse food. Her most notable accomplishment is running through the fence into the 1000 acre open space adjacent to her field, then becoming hysterical when she couldn't figure out how to get back IN the field she had just left.
I don't know what the point of Nell is, really, except that sometimes you're the only chance a horse has, and I'm that for her. A lot is said all over social media about only saving horses that are "worth saving ". I don't think Nell probably fits that description for most people. 33 years is a lot of money down the drain. But 33 years is also 33 years more than she was ever going to get, just because she's not "useful". It's not her fault she's not useful. She didn't ask to be born with crappy genetics and a less than sparkling personality. I chose her, so she's my job until she dies. I guess that's the point of Nell. I'm lucky to be in a position to care for her all these years, and she's lucky I decided to do it. If anyone takes anything away from this story, I hope it's that sometimes you just should because you can. Happy new year from me and my old goat, Nell.
