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Linda Cowles Hoof Care - Serving the greater SF Bay Area and Northern California

Good-bye, Kadanse...

Earlier page

3/2/1985 to 7/7/2009.... 24 great years..

The pictures in this article are from july 6 and 7, 2009...

July 7, 2009 - One of my old guys, Kadanse, left me at 9:30 today with the help of a wonderful vet Dr Steve Wood from Cotati Vet. It was probably a few short hours before he would have passed naturally... It was still hard to do.

Kadanse was a huge horse in a tiny body. With lots of character and extremely cute, he looked exactly like a carousel horse with perfect chiseled features.

He accumulated many aliases over the years; The Pony From Hell, Bug, Death Wish, Crotch Rocket, Jolt, and Buzz Saw were a few of the more memorable ones. He sent me to the hospital twice, and dumped me many more times “on accident”…  He was always distressed that I came off…

I used to say he could go from now to the middle of next week in the blink of an eye. Several of you have witnessed these mishaps… he was a sweet little guy, but a hazard on four hooves -- IF you were an adult, that is!!

If you were a kid? He was ridden by kids in a plain rope halter at Judy Jenkins Patchworks Farm, and was absolutely rock steady for them. I had a helicopter pass 40 feet directly overhead in Santa Teresa Park, once… he was being ridden by an 11 year old girl. He froze solid, his eyes rolled back in his head, and… he shook. That’s it. Gabby, who I was riding,  was a mess!! Kadanse stood as still as he could. If I had been on him? He’d have been up a tree or in the next county.

In the Beginning

I got Kadanse when he was a ten year old... he was bred by a friend, got into the wrong hands twice, and was rescued by another friend who gave him to me when she needed to find him a new home. She is an excellent rider, but… he dumped her so fast that she refused to ride him again..

He was a well bred gray Arabian. His dams sire was Karadjordje, his sire’s sire was Gdansk, and he had Gdansk on his dam’s side as well. He was perfect, except that he was tiny.

At 14 hands tall, he had haunches the size of a quarter horse, and was the most athletic horse I’ve ever ridden. Not comfortable - he had over-the-top suspension! - but athletic. He was born with great dressage movement… I fanaticized about riding quadrille with 17 hand warmblood's… never did it. Too bad. We did some dressage, though, and he was splendid.

My first real Kadanse ride...

The first time I got on Kadence after bringing him home, he was relatively unconditioned. He was also notoriously hot and competitive, so I took him to a local park (Mt Madonna in Morgan Hill, CA) to ride alone where I had 4 miles of fire road ascending to 1500 feet.

I figured we'd walk and stop a lot going up the hill, and I could hand walk him down if he was still crazy at the top. I never would have done this on a large horse that acted this way, but he was TINY! I thought that made him safe. Live and learn!

I rode some endurance at the time, had a heart rate monitor on my saddle, so I hooked it up.  

Getting on him was a nightmare; he was tiny and spun and leapt as I tried to mount. AND I had a treeless saddle on him, making mounting harder. A friend had just ridden down the hill, and she held him at I climbed up, and looked at me like I was nuts...”Are you sure you want me to turn him lose?”…  his eyes were rolling, he was snorting and pawing, and when she released the reins, he spun in circles like a crazy thing.

He had something like 5 months of professional training, had been shown before and was ridden extensively on the trail, but I saw none of that. He had supposedly finished 2 endurance rides in Nevada years before, though; that part of his story is uncertain.

I had worked with him at home on the ground, and nothing made any difference... I figured I would simply ride him, long and slow, and let mileage do what training hadn’t. It was hot the day of that first ride… heat is suppose to slow a hot horse down, right? I weighed around 150 pounds, no light weight.  He went almost 2 miles up a fire road at a head-tossing jog before his heart rate reached 160...

He had heart.

Training him took me many years and the help of Deb Cooper, who was at the time Pat Parelli's "Problem Horse Trainer"... he almost killed me at one point, and by the time he was done with me? I was a real horseperson, could ride almost any cavort, any spook...

Barefoot?? Two sets of front shoes in 25 years

Kadanse had never worn shoes, perhaps wouldn't allow anyone to shoe him. When you raised a front leg, the whole front end of the little horse rose up with it, in a collected evade , just like a tiny Lipizzaner.

At the time (1994 or so) I believed that all long distance trail horses needed to be shod for protection, so even though he was always the soundest of my horses, I sedated him once to shoe him in front because I thought I would do some easy endurance and wanted to protect him. He had done fine with riding drag on NATRC rides (barefoot), once he got the hang of it.

He moved so funny in shoes that I gave them up after the second pair.  He was never - ever - the least bit lame, no matter where I rode him.

Getting Old...

So recent times… Kadanse had gotten weaker over the past month, he acted like he had a stroke but... I wasn't sure. I tried giving him doxycycline last week and it didn't help. This all started 2 years ago, and I had a through vet check done. At the time, the tests came back normal, the vet said it wasn't a stroke. We gave him anti inflammatory drugs and… he got a bit better. At the time my  animal communicator friend said he had a tumor.

When the symptoms started back up, I watched him for a few weeks… he wasn’t bad, just acted old and weak. When he declined, I made the appointment to have my vet come check him, potentially to euphemize him,  last week, hoping he would recover. Twenty Four is sooo young and he was my Ever-ready Bunny, I figured he would outlive all of us! He's continued to decline, stumbling, wouldn't lay down to sleep because he couldn't get back up... he looked exhausted.

Today? He went out just like he went out that first time I rode him... 30 minutes before the vet came, I had him all cleaned up, he'd had his bucket (his appetite was always great) and had him out grazing and eating carrots... two friends were with me. At 9 o'clock, when the vet was scheduled to be there, he started acting delirious, started pawing and trying to trot in circles around me, staggering, tossing his head and snorting. When my vet got out of his truck, Kadanse took a deep sigh and stood quietly.

I love this vet, he's working with me on an Auburn Univ. case study, and he came over, wanting to save him... but seeing he was delirious, gave me a few more minutes and gently asked “Are you ready?” We were…. Kadence was past anyone helping him, though...
So with the help of two blue syringes, taken very quietly, Kadanse moved on to another realm...

It soooo sucks.... He taught me more than I can describe. Huge horse, tiny body.

He taught me what barefoot was all about, how sound a barefoot horse could be. He had weird looking feet, I thought… his toes always looked a little long, his hoof capsule was a bit shallow.... but he could trot or gallop over nails or glass, even in the winter.

It's so hard putting him down, saying good bye.

I asked the man with the truck, the livestock hauler, to take his legs for me. He carefully removed them, three at the mid canon bone and one front above the knee, and wrapped them in garbage bags before loading Kadanse up... Its all I have of him, and I know he still has a lot more to teach me and others.

I'm donating one or two to Dr Bob Bowker, if he wants them. The long front leg will be a bone specimen, and I'll make an articulating limb like Pete Ramey used in his video and lectures, and the hind and other fore leg will go to Horse Science to be made into cadaver specimens, for teaching...

I simply can't bear to part with all of him,,,

Dear Kadanse,

I love you, Kiddo... and I miss you so much it crushes me.... Thanks for al of the great times.

Love, Mom.