Hot cocoa! Swiss Miss, to be exact - my first and current horse. This is a dedicated journal for April, aka Swiss Miss. April and hot cocoa have quite a bit in common, hence the title (if you can let me call hot cocoa "bay")!
People who have seen a few of my posts around have probably pieced together a bit of her story already, but I figured it's about time I put it all down somewhere. There's a lot to it, so I'm planning to break up everything that's happened before now into a few different posts on this thread, and I'm going to try my best to keep it chronological.
I know very little about April's history before 2015. I know that she was surrendered to the MSSPA (Maine State Society for the Protection of Animals) as a foal after some kind of abdomen injury, and that she was born in 2008. I've heard "wild cat attack" a lot - I'm assuming only a bobcat would be brave enough to attack a foal but not capable of killing it - and the mention of her being emaciated at the time. As found on a news post on the MSSPA's website by the Wayback machine: "Skeletal, recovering from wounds to her abdomen, April spent her first month after rescue living at a veterinary clinic. Eventually transported to the MSSPA’s River Road farm, she wasn’t even a year old when she stepped off the trailer with her filly friend Nutmeg."
Given the rescue knows she is half Arabian and half Standardbred, I hunted down who her sire is: Infidels Design, the only Arabian stallion at stud in Maine of which April is a spitting image of. This makes me think someone decided to breed their backyard Standardbred mare to him, but then were not able to sustain their care - thus the MSSPA stepped in.
Will continue in further posts!
First photo is April, 2nd is Infidels Design, 3rd and 4th pictures show her scars from her wounds as a foal.
People who have seen a few of my posts around have probably pieced together a bit of her story already, but I figured it's about time I put it all down somewhere. There's a lot to it, so I'm planning to break up everything that's happened before now into a few different posts on this thread, and I'm going to try my best to keep it chronological.
I know very little about April's history before 2015. I know that she was surrendered to the MSSPA (Maine State Society for the Protection of Animals) as a foal after some kind of abdomen injury, and that she was born in 2008. I've heard "wild cat attack" a lot - I'm assuming only a bobcat would be brave enough to attack a foal but not capable of killing it - and the mention of her being emaciated at the time. As found on a news post on the MSSPA's website by the Wayback machine: "Skeletal, recovering from wounds to her abdomen, April spent her first month after rescue living at a veterinary clinic. Eventually transported to the MSSPA’s River Road farm, she wasn’t even a year old when she stepped off the trailer with her filly friend Nutmeg."
Given the rescue knows she is half Arabian and half Standardbred, I hunted down who her sire is: Infidels Design, the only Arabian stallion at stud in Maine of which April is a spitting image of. This makes me think someone decided to breed their backyard Standardbred mare to him, but then were not able to sustain their care - thus the MSSPA stepped in.
Will continue in further posts!
First photo is April, 2nd is Infidels Design, 3rd and 4th pictures show her scars from her wounds as a foal.