While not as common as a cat up a tree, a horse in a hayloft can get just as stuck.
Case in point: Phoenix, a palomino quarter horse who hoofed it up the stairs to the upper level of his barn in Botetourt County, where he spent Thursday night trapped in the hayloft before a special rescue team rode in from out of town and brought him back down.
“Anybody that owns a horse has a story. It’s just the nature of the beast,” said Carol Witt Pugh, who keeps Phoenix and two other horses on her farm near Blue Ridge.
But “never in a million years” did Pugh expect to be telling the story of a 1,200-pound horse who went up the stairs and couldn’t get down.
It started about 10:30 Thursday night, after the Pughs arrived home from their daughter’s volleyball game. Pugh’s husband went out to feed the horses in the barn, where he found Phoenix peering down from the hayloft, a bit bewildered by it all.
How did the 16-year-old gelding get up there? The Pughs have a theory. Her name is Dolly.
When they took in the 32-year-old mare a year ago, they were warned that the former rodeo horse could be a little bossy. “She is queen of the barn, queen of the pasture, she’s the queen of everything,” Pugh said.
Because of a recent flood, the horses were not in their stalls. In all likelihood, a tussle broke out and Phoenix took the first escape route he could find – knocking down a board blocking the stairs and clomping his way upstairs.
Efforts to lead Phoenix back down failed. Mindful that the horse might break his leg while walking down the steep stairwell, the Pughs kept a gun on hand – just in case the worst happened.
“Now, looking back, he was the smartest one of us all,” Pugh said. “I’m so glad we listened to him.”
Phoenix was tied to a post and left in the hayloft with food and water. During a mostly sleepless night, Pugh described her predicament on social media, asking if anyone knew where she might turn for help.
She had an answer from a friend the next morning: the Technical Large Animal Rescue Team at the Little Fork Volunteer Fire and Rescue Company in Culpeper County. Pugh called a number she found online and within minutes, Chief Doug Monaco was on the line.
“We’ve got this,” Monaco told her.
Within a few minutes, Monaco had mobilized what he said is the only volunteer unit in Virginia that specializes in technical rescues of horses and cows. The team responds to several calls a week from across the state – ranging from cows stuck in the mud to horses trapped in wrecked trailers to a cat that fell 64 feet down a dried-up well.
Once they arrived at the Pugh farm, team members were joined by members of the Botetourt County Fire and EMS Department, some of them trained in large animal rescue but lacking the equipment and expertise of their Culpeper counterparts.
“This was definitely a unique situation,” Deputy Chief Jason Ferguson said. “That wasn’t on their list of things they had thought about a horse doing.”
The team scoped out the hayloft, studied the possible rescue options, and checked out their patient. “Animal behavior is a big part of this, being able to understand them,” Monaco said.
While Phoenix was not totally spooked, his health – he has the equine equivalent of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease – made the rescue more complicated. After deciding it was too risky to build a ramp or cut a hole in the barn floor, the team decided to sedate the horse and slide him down the stairs on a heavy-duty plastic glide secured by ropes and chains.
Dr. Tarah Satalino of Windover Equine Services was called in to administer a dose of ketamine heavy enough to put Phoenix under for surgery. But the straps holding him to the glide aggravated the horse’s breathing problems, and the chaotic situation caused him to regain consciousness.
Satalino administered another dose and told the rescue team that they only had a few minutes to get him out. Having to loosen the glide straps “proved to be the greatest challenge,” Monaco would later write in an account of the rescue on his department’s Facebook page.
“We could not take the risk of having Phoenix struggle during the rescue.” A chain hoist system was scrapped because it would take too long, and team members ended up sliding the horse down the stairs themselves as he lay on the glide.
“It was just muscle and rope that got him out,” Pugh said.
Watching the rescue was “just heart-wrenching,” she said. “But I had the greatest group in the world on it. At no point did I feel they didn’t know what they were doing.”
Once outside, Phoenix had a bad reaction to the drugs. Satalino had to perform an emergency tracheotomy after he went into respiratory distress.
A few days later, Phoenix was recovering well from what the veterinarian called a touch-and-go situation.
“This horse was just one of a kind,” Satalino said. “He was the real hero, and we just followed his cue.”