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A horse is as good as a guest…or a horse was found. Could we bring her?
2012.07.09.

Someone found a horse. Could she come?



One afternoon we were about to go home from the Shelter when Zoli looked in our office – with a smile on his face ( well, that smile usually means something not good) and said: ’Someone found a horse.Could she come?’ Of course she could.

As it turned out Mr Sipos, the pound in Vácszentlászló had called him because a horse simply had walked in to a yard of a farm in Hévízgyök where people were mowing alfalfa and they had no idea whose horse she was. They didn’t know what to do so they called NOÉ as we have horse saving project.
After organizing a few things Mr Sipos offered to bring the horse in by his own horse transport that evening (so they didn’t have to travel in heat wave.)

They arrived around 7 pm and we put the horse next to Carmen. When I looked at her I didn’t have to think too much about her name, the first I could think of was Puncs so that was it. There was no problem with Carmen, Puncs acknowledged right away that Carmen was the boss so they were eating fay together five minutes later.



After finishing the paper work I went to take a look at the new acquest. I’m not very good in finding out how old a horse is so all I could see that she was a young (about 2-3 years old) mare who was probably with young. She was scared from every movement, after I had left her free I couldn’t catch her for hours (although the broken calf rope was still around her neck.) Finally, after hours of trying I managed to catch her and took the rope off of her neck (so she wouldn’t get stuck). I could see that there was ringworm on her two back legs which is a quite dogged skin illness in case of horses.

As it was getting late I started to feed them. At that point I realized that Puncs didn’t know anything about fodder. She knew that there was food in the bucket but she had no idea what to do with that whole meal wheat. Then she went to check what was in Carmen’s bucket but after a huge punch she went back to her own food. She was munching on her food so much that after finishing her own food Carmen ate Puncs’s dinner as well.
I tried to catch her again in the morning, I spent some time with her and did my best to make her understand that that was something called human touch and that’s a good thing. After the first touch she was scared like hell but after a while she let me stroke her body but not the ears. That was not so bad for the first time.

I catched her over and over again during that day and at the third time she didn’t want to run away and it took only a few minutes to catch her. I tried to stroke her body but she didn’t let me touch here ears again. I tried her legs too but she didn’t let them too.

Unfortunately when a herd is too big and there’s a wild horse among them who have never been dealt with, the only way it can be held down during a treatment, if people grab it by its ears or put a pipe on top of its nose. Eventually it’s much easier than dealing with it for five minutes a day… Because the only think it should know is how to stop in a halter and give its leg up when needed…
I spent some time with her in the afternoon too and by than I managed to get all her four legs up. However, I couldn’t touch her ears



We got a phone call in the evening that the owner was probably found. I wasn’t too happy abou that because it had a reason why she behaved the way she did.

My mistrust was ill-founded. As it turned out the owner had bought her only four days earlier so he wasn’t the one to blame for her behavioral. The horse had lived in a completely wild herd and she had contact with humans only once in a blue moon. The herd was eliminated and the owner bought Puncs from them. We also learnt that most of the horses from that herd ended up in a slaughterhouse because they couldn’t sell them… It was said that all of them looked like Puncs so they weren’t ramshackle runts… No comment…

For the next evening we organized a meeting with the owner at the Shelter where he had to show the horse’s papers. As Puncs had no branding iron nor chip therefore no passport either (not to mention the obigatory blood test in every three years) we told him to make up for it and we notified the competent official vet as well. We also learnt that she was not two but four years old and she was only one and a half months pregnant so she was plump just because of the food she got.
As for her escape she was tethered to graze and somehow she managed to unbind the rope and went away. It means the torn rope we found around her neck broke only sometime later. As she didn’t know the area she couldn’t go back home and she went to that alfalfa meadow only because of the food.
After finishing the paper work it was time to say goodbye to Puncs, a.k.a. Sellő. Thanks the time I spent with her she almost immediately walked up to the van after me. We also gave to the owner some betadine soap and alcoholic disinfestant which were given by our vet so they can treat the ringworm. Then we said goodbye.



I really got to love this little horse so I hope her life will be great int he future. The owner seems nice so I don’t think it will up to him

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