“If he couldn’t be my partner in that journey I didn’t want to do it anymore. I carried on with my business, but I was just a shell of a person.”
“I told everyone I wasn’t going to event anymore,” she
recalls. “Pirate gave me goals and dreams that wouldn’t have been real without him. If he couldn’t be my partner in that journey I didn’t want to do it anymore. I carried on with my business, but I was just a shell of a person.” Just two days later, British eventer Francis Whittington
Kelsey and Pirate after the jog at Jersey Fresh.
Unbelievable Accident Pirate was just coming back into proper work and prepar- ing to move back up to Intermediate, and hopefully Advanced later in the year, when he tragically broke his neck in the pasture on January 5, 2013, a day Kelsey will never forget. “We still have no idea how it happened, but I got there
that morning and he could barely move,” she recalls. Her local vet came out to the barn and tried to make Pirate comfortable, but it was two weeks before he was physi- cally able to get on the trailer and be taken to a veterinarian in Statesville, North Carolina, who radiographed Pirate and discovered a significant break in one of his vertebrae, just a fraction of an inch from his spinal cord. That vet told Kelsey that she would never ride Pirate again. When the vet in Statesville sent the radiographs to
another veterinarian at North Carolina State University, that vet asked if the horse had been euthanized yet. But Kelsey’s vet at home replied, “You don’t know this horse.” “Pirate was happy enough and had his ears up, but looked
like the worst EPM case you’ve ever seen,” Kelsey says. “I wouldn’t put him down unless he was suffering miserably, so we set out to make him comfortable. The vet thought he’d never be sound again; he thought he’d have to be on quiet turnout with a pony.” She put him on the trailer and took him home, figuring
he’d never even be a trail horse, but unwilling to let him go. She was losing hope of ever riding him again.
38 January/February 2016
arrived to teach a clinic at Kelsey’s farm. “I was trying to hold it together and host this clinic, but I was out of my mind with grief at the thought of losing my life as I knew it, with Pirate’s career being cut so short. Francis was devastated for me, but he would not let me accept Pirate’s fate,” she recalls. “He sat there with me until like 2 a.m. looking at pictures and videos and told me he wasn’t going to give up on me. He gave me reason to believe Pirate could get through this.” Incidentally Francis had a broken finger and had
brought an ArcEquine machine along for his own rehabili- tation. He told Kelsey that he’d seen the machine do amaz- ing things, and left it with her to try on Pirate. Ian Thirkell of ArcEquine briefly explains how the machine works. “Microcurrent technology relies upon the reintroduction of minute sequences of electrical current to the body. These are measured in millionths of an amp and cannot be felt. They mimic the currents that exist in all animals and work systemically at cellular level. This reintroduction acts as a catalyst to kick start and accelerate many normal bodily functions which, as a result of damage, disease or trauma, are no longer operating, or operating to their maximum ability,” he says. “Overnight it made a huge difference in his level of
pain,” she says. “He started putting his head out the stall door for the first time. It helped with the swelling in a way that bute and other things weren’t doing. I’m not the best person to talk to about how all these things work, but Pirate went from a miserable, broken-necked horse to acting kind of normal. He was still horribly lame but he went from me pulling him along on the lead to him dragging me along! By March, he was trotting around the paddock and by May he was bucking and acting like a normal horse. In July, Dr. Travis came down to X-ray him and said I could get back on him!”
Courtesy Kelsey Briggs
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