A SAD ANNIVERSARY.........!!!

Eight years ago today, we had an incident that headed us down the road of rescue. The donkey in the foreground is the 1st Cisco. We bought him from a horse trader as a friend for BlackJack. He was in horrible condition, he had open habronema sores on his face, sheath, legs & had been used as a roping donkey. The woman told us he had been handed around in the "roping community" for quite sometime, & she had picked him up at the auction cheap, because no one wanted him. I would imagine he had quit running, & they just wanted to get rid of him.

Since then I've learned a lot about habronema, but at the time I knew absolutely nothing & my Vet at the time, didn't know much more, except to worm every week.

We had him 7 months & as you can see from the picture above he had come a long way & we had managed to get control of the habronema.

This picture was taken a few days before we had the Vet out, because we had noticed he wasn't dropping to pee. She put him on the ground, found out the sores on his sheath had adhered to each other, healed that way & consequently he couldn't drop. She started cutting & discovered she was in over her abilities for field surgery. At the time we did not have a trailer, & although she said she could pack where she had cut & we could haul him to the Equine Center in Gilbert, if we could find a trailer, the outcome probably wouldn't be good. So on January 19, 2000 we made the decision to euthanize him.

He was only about 7 years old, & probably had never had a safe home. He & BJ had learned to play together & it was heartbreaking to have to put a young healthy animal down, because we couldn't help him. I put an ad in the paper to give a good home to free donkeys. We got 3 donkeys from that ad, all with health issues, & as they say, the rest is history.

I wonder if Cisco came to us to show us the path we should take. I hope so, because otherwise his death would be such a waste.