By Leo de Natale
The ochre-colored building sits ensconced on a hilltop in rural Agawam, Massachusetts. At first glance it could pass for a warehouse or storage area for the potatoes and broad-leaf tobacco that are grown in this western Massachusetts town. But the pungent mixture of horseflesh, manure and winter hay reveals its true identity. The New England Equine Auction Center is indeed a stable. For some horses it is a way station to the next barn or riding school where 14-year-old pre-pubescents will yank the mouth and kick the body with insensitive spurs.
For the remainder of those soft-eyed creatures with their coats of brown, black or gray, it means the proverbial end of the line: bidders for dog food companies – in the horse world known as “The Killers”- are always well represented at the weekly Thursday auction.
The horses stand there, row after row, peering over their steel-piped enclosures with as many stories to tell as the two-legged man/beasts standing astride and free on the other side. One horse, an emaciated gray five-year-old mare has escaped the noose. A plump middle-aged mother and her two teenaged daughters describe how they’ve scraped together $500 on this admittedly doubtful reclamation project.
The horse’s exposed rib cage and pelvic bones, thrusting through the scruffy skin of its hindquarters and the whip scars behind the neck tell the story. New wounds from horsebites demonstrate the equine pecking order that culls the weak from the herd.
The woman tells how the family intends to sustain its new charge as her daughter applies salve to the mare’s wounds.
“She put her head on my husband’s shoulder, almost saying, ‘Please’,” the mother said of the Quixote-esque horse. “We just couldn’t let her wind up in a tin can.”
The gray horse’s roommate, an old black-and-white pinto in the adjacent stall is destined for a different fate. It stands there, listless, while the round-wormed parasites holiday within dark, diseased intestines and have ballooned the pinto’s abdomen to twice its normal girth. The pinto just stands, lacking the energy to swat as a convention of flies swarm unmolested around a motionless tail. Within twenty-four hours the once noble beast will droop its eyes, gasp its last breath and crash upon the ground, its face covered with sawdust and woodchips.
Pinto horse has beaten the system. No more trailers to untold places, no electric stun gun to shock its head into oblivion. Rather, a backhoe will unceremoniously drag its hind hooves to burial in an adjacent meadow where new, young legs will prance over the bones.
Requiescat In Pace, sweet horse.
leodenatale.com 