Husha Busha we all fall down and work from home

From Rick Riordan's, The Trials of Apollo

If you've been living under a rock, or several rocks, since you're in pieces trying to take cover from the shit show that has been 2020, I'd like to commiserate and speak for everyone (like a white man), with this Office meme.

I've written about fruit caked plans before and at this point it feels like I will end up writing an entire cook book on it ('I am giving this book 1 star since it doesn't have a single recipe on cake' - Amazon user m45idly)

TW : Sick animals, heartbreak, tiny violins

In the beginning of this year, while the entire country was protesting against the vile CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act), we at the farm were faced with both Django and Koko suddenly getting ill and getting worse fast.

It was right after we'd so proudly harvested our rice.

 Beating the paddy to get the rice kernels

Nephew Deva learning the trade

Broken rice after putting the rice kernels through the mill

Since it was the week of Pongal, almost all the vets who work rurally had taken a break and left for their respective home towns. We were left making call after hopeless call reaching out for vets only to be curtly told that they weren't available. And all the while? We had Koko falling a lot and Django not being able to walk straight.

The big Pongal celebration, Sun TV special style dream we'd had, quickly turned to dust. No matter that our families tried to have some semblance of it.

Kolam by Mani's sister Banu

We also welcomed a new baby goat into our farm that week.

 Thenmozhi our fellow farmer with the mother and kid

Kid!

When we did finally get a vet willing to help us, it was two and a half weeks of Mani driving close to 200km a day trying to get medicines and blood tests done.

Trying to keep our horses alive.

We even sold two of our goats to pay for our expenses. (Most farmers have to since their livelihood depends on this, so please for the love of God take my tiny violin from me). The irony wasn't lost on us that we were sending two healthy animals to their death to help save our sick ones. We didn't even say goodbye.

At one point, Koko couldn't get up at all. She was hurting herself trying to get up. We were advised to put her down. And even then, a vet wasn't available to do this for us.

We had to take the call.

We had to euthanise her ourselves.

I can't begin to describe how devastating losing her has been. I hope I can one day get over the visceral pain of having watched her suffer, of losing her, and write about how much she meant to us and what a magnificent friend and horse she was.  

Koko when she could last have grass

Till now, we don't know what hit her and the vet who finally came to our call and helped us, could only guess at that point. 

A day after she died, our vet told us to get Django to the government veterinary hospital in Chennai.

You know the term 'to hell and back'? This is what it felt like when we,

• Had to cart ourselves on an open truck with a sick horse since no horse ambulance was available or coming to 'so far away' and every minute, not knowing if Django will survive the three hour journey.

• Reaching the hospital at night to find it doesn't have the facility to board a horse and being told to wait till the next day for a consultation.

• Finding an enclosed sand pit with an already dying horse in it, left abandoned, and keeping our horse there since there was no other place to wait in.

• Watching the dying horse die and hope this isn't our horse tomorrow.

• Have vet students swarm around us and tell us to hold our horse down as they extract cerebral fluid from Django's head.

• Having to hold him down with increasing force as the days go by and he needs two dozen bottles of fluids a day and six separate injections to boot.

• Watch in desperation as student vets keep poking him trying to find a vein and Django doing everything he can to get away. Try 'keeping still' a 400kg animal in panic.

• Staying in the sand pit with him night and day since the hospital doesn't have handlers for their patients.

• Beg for test results only to be told all the results are negative.

• Make the decision to discharge our horse ourselves since nobody gives a shit anymore.

• Take Django to a horse sanctuary and watch him slowly improve but uncharacteristically not socialise with the other horses.

 The chief groom Chandran at the sanctuary helping us look after Django.

Django and I having a moment at the sanctuary

At one point we had to make the decision on whether we were going to be able to bring Django back to the land or not. Since he seemingly recovered and we were told to give him a contraceptive injection to prevent him getting sick again, we were given the green signal to bring him back home.

The months of February and March were some of our best.

We brought Django home, found him another horse so he wouldn't be alone. This was Shadow, a mixed marwari horse giving joy rides at Marina Beach and used for weddings, whom we brought home.

You could see how quickly Django was improving, especially with his new friend.

This was also the time we finally went exploring the lakebed next to our land. It was such an adventure taking the horses and our dogs with us!

Shadow :)

We'd also received help in the form of Sinraasu (Thenmozhi's son) who offered to be our horse's groom.

Sinraasu with his favourite :)

Around the same time, we also decided to build walls for our stables. Koko when she was sick had fallen over several of the stable bars and broken them and we vowed for this to never happen again.

We took out several loans trying to build ourselves back. Soon after we brought Shadow, we brought home Red, a young thoroughbred mare from the race track. She was to be joined by another horse from her racing stables at our farm soon.

 Everyone's friend, Red :)

Our nephew Monesh with Red at the paddock

We'd also arranged for Manjeev our teacher from Manjeev Natural Horsemanship, to come visit us the end of March to help us regroup and restart our natural horsemanship training and community.

Only to cue a pandemic and a lockdown.

Things got very difficult at the village. We were at our wit's end trying to figure out the logistics of getting the horses their feed of oats and bran from the city when everything was under lockdown. Getting permission felt like a miracle.

We were glad we had other food staples like the rice and vegetables we'd grown, to help sustain ourselves.

Tomatoes from a plant which grew from being near our kitchen water. This plant gave us enough and more to cook with for two months

Ladies finger poriyal cooked by Mani

Then in mid-April, Django fell sick again. He was showing the same symptoms he did in January.

There was no way we could transport him with the lockdown and even if we did, the veterinary hospital was closed indefinitely.

I had to keep at my vet, to give me a prescription so we could treat Django ourselves with the medicines at hand.

Mani had literal blood on his hands everyday he had to find Django's vein and insert the IV needle. Both of us had never trained as vets but it has since become clear to us that as a horse owner, you need to know how to administer various injections.

Every time we neared the supposed end of the lockdown we hoped we could get Django to a hospital and every time, the lockdown would get extended. I remember constantly mind-voicing Django with 'hold on, just until this lockdown ends'.

And somehow he did.

Our vet came to the conclusion that he was being chronically poisoned while at the land. He suspected that it could be the quarry blasting dynamite everyday that made our horses sick. Or it could be that we were bordered by farms spraying fertilisers, pesticides, rodenticides and herbicides, every which way.

What protected us from all that spraying and quarry dust? 
Nothing.
Did it matter that we were 'organic'?
No. 
We were a 3 acre plot too small to even begin thinking of having a buffer zone from all the intensive farming around us.

I want to pause here to note that our neighbour farmers using these sprays? They aren't the 'villains' of the story. Not even the quarry. Our massive rates of consumption which pay in bread crumbs for the farmer's grain is a story we all know and conveniently forget time and time again. Let's not blame farming families for doing what they can to earn a living in a poverty game that is rigged against them. And as much as we resent the quarry coming up next to our land, it was from this self same quarry that we got material to build our own house. And it is for this blue metal from quarries feeding Real Estate and Construction economies, that dynamite has to be blown everyday (come ground water or air contamination #itscomplicated).

So with the vet stating his hunch on poisoning and the hospitals still not open, we brought Django to the sanctuary.

We are extremely grateful to the sanctuary's Pooja and her team for opening their doors for us (once again!!) and that too during a freaking pandemic. If it weren't for her, we'd have had to give up our horses and find homes for them in shelters. Please do consider checking out her ketto fundraiser to help her support her work and her team.

We brought both Shadow and Red to the sanctuary two weeks later and not a moment too soon. There was another lockdown on the way and Shadow had coliced the same week.

Django has since been recovering and doing much better. We found an eye-worm (!!!!!!!) in his eye which we were able to remove quickly thanks to the vet being nearby. I'm pretty certain that if we had been at the farm, Mani would have had to YouTube the procedure to do it himself.

Red and Django have formed a herd of two and usually go off on their own during grazing times when all the horses are let out. Shadow is like a teenager who hates everyone and we're trying to work on grazing him by hand so he doesn't have to be in his stables all day. His behaviour makes sense with his stallion qualities coming to the fore, regardless that he is a gelding.

    Some chill scenes at the sanctuary

So here we are now, for all that has happened, we have been incredibly lucky to be supported by friends and family in getting ourselves and our horses safe and near medical care. 
For every valley of shit we had to cross, we had folks having our back.

It feels right to end this post on a credits song of a favourite movie, so I'll leave it at that and with this (excellent) picture I took of Mani, Shadow and Rocky the horse herder :)