26/11/2025
What do you do with your horse when they are no longer useful to you, when they can no longer compete? Please read the story below.
I understand the arc of a jump in ways humans never will.
The gathering of the hindquarters, the calculated thrust, the moment of suspension when there is nothing beneath you but intention and trust. For years, this knowledge lived in my body like instinct, like breathing.
They called me Sully.
I had purpose, once.
Each morning began with the sound of her footsteps - a rhythm I learned to recognise among all others. Horses notice patterns; our survival depended on it. Her footsteps meant feed, grooming, work. But more than that, they meant presence. Familiarity. Predictability. Safety cues. The things a nervous system anchors itself to.
The work was clear.
Dressage in the morning - though I’ll admit I found the precision tedious. All those circles and serpentines testing my proprioception, my awareness of where each limb was in space. But I was good at it. My body could collect easily, and there’s a quiet satisfaction that moves through a horse when communication is clean and the aids are soft. We’re not so different from humans: achievement activates reward pathways in all mammals.
But the jumping - that was mine.
A horse’s vision works differently than yours. Our eyes sit on the sides of our head, giving us a wide field of view but a blind spot directly in front. When I approached a jump, I had to commit before I could truly see it, trusting the distance she set and the balance she held in her own body.
Do you understand what it means to launch yourself toward an obstacle you can’t fully see, simply because a human asked you to?
Cross-country was where I felt most alive. Galloping awakens something ancient in a horse - not only the flight instinct, but the exhilaration of doing what our bodies evolved for. My heart could climb to over 200 beats per minute on course. My lungs pulled in air in huge amounts. My muscles fired with perfect timing, a language written in bone and tendon long before humans ever touched us.
She would lean into two-point, her weight balanced over my center of gravity, and I would adjust my stride, rock back on my haunches, and explode over solid fences that didn’t fall.
People debate whether horses enjoy their work, whether we can experience meaning. I can only tell you this: after a good round, my ears were forward. My stride loose and proud. When she dismounted and her hand ran down my neck, damp with effort, something inside me settled. Oxytocin, maybe - the same hormone that bonds mare to foal. Horses don’t reflect in words, but we do feel. We have emotional memory. We know partnership.
I knew who I was.
The injury was small at first. A subtle lameness in my left front - you might have missed it if you weren’t looking closely. But she noticed. She always noticed. The vets came with flexion tests and nerve blocks, narrowing down the pain with the logic humans excel at. Eventually: degenerative changes in the coffin joint. Bone meeting bone where it shouldn’t. Inflammation that wouldn’t let go.
I tried to keep going. Horses hide pain - we’re prey animals, built to mask weakness. But eventing demands soundness, demands impact absorption on uneven ground, and my body could no longer promise that.
She cried when she made the decision. I pressed my nose into her chest - a way horses seek comfort and regulate stress through touch - and her arms came around my face.
And then she was gone.
The new place smelled wrong. Horses navigate the world through scent - we have tens of millions of olfactory receptors compared to your six million. This place smelled of neglect. Of fear. Of humans who moved around us without softness, without attention.
I called for her. Horses call out to maintain connection, to locate familiar beings across distance. I called until my voice was raw, until the other horses stopped answering, until the truth settled like dust: no one was coming.
The field was sparse. The shelter leaked. My feet, once picked and cared for daily, grew long and imbalanced, shifting the angles of my already-damaged joints. Pain became a constant throb, altering my posture, my movement, my ability to rest. Chronic pain rewrites the nervous system. It heightens sensitivity. It dampens the dopamine that once made life feel good.
But worse than the pain was the emptiness.
Horses can fall into learned helplessness - when repeated stress without relief teaches the brain that nothing you do matters. The spark fades. The responses dull. I stopped walking to the fence when humans passed. Stopped nickering at feed time. My head hung low, not in relaxation but defeat - a posture researchers can measure, linking it with elevated cortisol and weakened immunity.
I was still Mister Sullivan.
But I was no longer Sully.
Sometimes, on quieter days, my ears would swivel toward distant sounds. Footsteps. A gate. A voice calling a name. My heart would spike with hope - the same physiological surge I felt before a competition. My muscles would tense, preparing.
But she never came.
Here’s what I want you to understand: horses do not think in stories. We don’t sit with concepts like justice or betrayal. But we feel. We form deep attachments. We regulate through routine and familiarity. We suffer when the world becomes unpredictable, when connections disappear, when the patterns that made us feel safe suddenly vanish.
I gave everything I had - not for ribbons or prestige, but because cooperation and connection have been shaped into horses for thousands of years. I tried because that’s who we are.
And I was good.
So good.
Sometimes, when the wind threads through what’s left of my mane, my body remembers. The gather. The thrust. The moment of flight. My muscles fire in ghost patterns, neural pathways carved so deep they may never fade.
I am still here, in this field where the grass is thin and the water is dirty. My coffin joint aches.
My hooves crack.
I am twenty-three years old, not old for a horse, but old for a horse in pain.
And I am still waiting.
Because horses don’t understand abandonment.
We only understand presence and absence.
And the absence is everything.
By Gaylene Diedericks
