Great Falls Tribune, May 6, 2005
Blind foal finds a home on the range.
By KEILA SZPALLER
Tribune Staff Writer
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She is 4 weeks old, willful and ornery. She deprived one man of sleep for a week. She is blind but once jumped and threw the man against a wall. Plain as the white stripe down her nose, though, the foal wins hearts.
She stopped in Great Falls on Thursday on her way to Ovando, which will soon be her home.
"She's a nice little thing," said Taylor Seltzer, a Hubble Horse Transportation partner who drove her from South Carolina to Montana.
Her new owner, Steve Smith, already called her "darling."
Smith and Alayne Marker own the Rolling Dog Ranch Animal Sanctuary, a 160-acre ranch just east of Ovando. The nonprofit ranch, in operation since 2000, is home to 70 disabled animals.
Three weeks ago, the ranch received an e-mail from a barn manager in South Carolina. A foal had been born. Her father is a champion. But the foal was born blind. The owner was ready to euthanize her and wasn't willing to wait long. Would the Rolling Dog Ranch take her?
Smith and his wife said yes. Utah-based Best Friends Animal Society agreed to pay for her trip.
Last Wednesday, in South Carolina, Seltzer loaded the Paint horse into a six-horse slant trailer bound, eventually, for Montana.
Seltzer built her a box in her stall so she could stay safe and snug. Then, they departed. They stopped in Delaware, Massachusetts and Ohio. They paused in Kentucky where she kicked up her heels, then Minnesota.
Along the way, Seltzer stopped the trailer to bottle feed her every two hours, then every three hours. She was feisty. Once, protesting a vitamin pack mixed with the milk in her bottle, she threw him against a wall.
"I sat her down, and we had a little talk," Seltzer said. Thursday, he whispered to her, nose-to-nose when her long legs danced. "Easy girl, easy," he would say, and she would relax.
When Seltzer picked up his own mare, Summer Reign, in Delaware, the foal calmed. She rode with her head resting on Summer's rump, he said.
She was the hit of the trip. Most people had a hard time believing that the plucky Paint couldn't see, he said.
But she can't. Her eyeballs have little nubs that protrude from a place where pupils should be. In the Ovando-bound trailer near a barn in the Montana ExpoPark, Steve Smith scratched her chin, then her short light-brown mane. After a short while, her fuzzy brown ears tilted forward and she nibbled his shirt.
Blind horses aren't new to the Rolling Dog Ranch. Lena, the first horse to join the sanctuary, is a blind quarter horse. With the new foal, they'll have 17 blind horses total. The sightless horses relish their lives on the ranch just like the seeing ones, Smith said. They run right up to — but usually not into — the smooth, flexible fences that can bend and give.
Nikki, a blind 1-year-old, jumps and kicks and whirls around in the air when she's in the pasture.
Their first horse, Lena, a 12-year-old with a motherly instinct, probably will teach the new foal how to get around, Smith said.
"We'll name her Destiny," he said.
It should be an enviable one. Destiny probably will pick treats out of her caretakers' pockets, he said. If she is like the other horses, she'll roll on her back in the pasture, flat grassland surrounded by sagebrush and Cottonwood trees. From the south-facing window in their living room, Smith and Marker watch their horses roll and play. It gives them great joy, Smith said.
