Surviving the Fire
Aiken Equine Rescue Perseveres By Pam Gleason
A
pril 3, 2021 had been an ordinary Saturday at Aiken Equine Rescue, a 90-acre nonprofit horse rescue farm located on Aiken’s Southside. The day had been bright and sunny with highs in the 60s during an unusually cool and dry South Carolina spring. Volunteers had been on the property to care for the horses; a few people had been in for tours. Caroline Mulstay, the rescue manager, fed the horses and went home at around 6 o’clock. Debbie Rhodes, a board member who is married to Jim Rhodes, the rescue’s president, had spent most of the afternoon riding and doing outdoor things around the farm. Nothing seemed different or out-of-place. A little before 7, Debbie decided to go in and get ready for dinner. She and Jim have a home on the property, and she had just gotten inside and taken off her boots when she heard an explosion. “I can’t even tell you how loud it was,” she said. “It was much louder than fireworks or anything like that.” She pulled the blinds back in her house and looked out at the stable. To her shock, it was totally engulfed in flames. Without stopping to put on her boots, she ran out, barefoot, calling 911 on her cellphone. She had one thing on her mind. While the horses at the rescue generally live outside in spacious paddocks with run-in sheds, there was one animal in the stable. This was a miniature pinto pony named Whistle. Whistle had recently been taken in by the rescue after being mauled by a dog. He had needed extensive surgery to repair his muzzle and had spent time in the clinic at Performance Equine Vets. Now that he was home, he was living in a corner stall. Debbie’s only thought was that he needed to get out. The stable at AER was a concrete block structure with concrete aisles, but wooden struts and a wooden, shingled roof. It was a shedrow style with an office, and every stall had two doors, back and front. Only three of the stalls were normally used for horses, while the others were used for tack and equipment storage. Debbie ran around the back of the barn to the paddock that connected to Whistle’s stall. “Thankfully he was in that stall, because that was literally the only one I could have gotten to – the others were so engulfed that I couldn’t have gotten to them from either side,” she said. “His stall was already on fire: the roof was on fire, the shavings were on fire, and there was so much smoke you couldn’t see a thing. So I couldn’t see him.” She couldn’t hear him either. She had no personal experience with stable fires: she had only seen them portrayed in the movies and on TV. In the movies, horses trapped in burning stables are frantic and whinnying. Whistle was doing none of that. Debbie was afraid that he was already dead. But she put her shirt over her face to filter the smoke and went into the stall anyway. Feeling around, she found him still alive and standing, and so she wrapped her arm around his neck, since she had no halter or lead rope, and she led him out of the barn and into the adjoining field and she set him loose. “There was nothing else I could do.” “He didn’t seem panicked or anything like that,” she continued. “But when he came out his mane was on fire, and the hair on his back was singeing, so he definitely had some burns on him.” Whistle did not seem to recognize his predicament at all; nor did he seem to be clinging to the perceived safety of his stall. “I wouldn’t say he was reluctant to come with me, but he was certainly in no hurry to come.” Once outside, Whistle trotted off – recently gelded, his first thought seemed to have been that he wanted to find some mares to breed or some other male horses to fight with. With him safe, Debbie called her husband Jim and she called Caroline Mulstay.
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The Aiken Horse
“I didn’t think there were any other horses in the barn, but we move horses around all the time. So I called her to say ‘Please Caroline, tell me there were no other horses in the barn.’” Fortunately, there were not. Within moments, neighbors showed up to help, and before ten minutes had passed, fire trucks and firefighters arrived to douse the flames. There was no chance of saving the structure as it was already essentially gutted when Debbie called 911. The rescue lost pallets of feed, many bales of hay, all its tack and equipment, and thousands of dollars worth of donated medical supplies. The fire jumped to a trailer full of tack. The office and all its equipment went up in flames. “For weeks, we discovered more things we had lost,” said Caroline. When Caroline got back to the rescue that evening, the firemen were already at work, and her main priority was to get Whistle back to Dr. Sabrina Jacobs at Performance Equine Vets for a full evaluation and treatment. “He seemed like he was fine, and I already had a vet on the way to check him out, but Dr. Jacobs said that the effects of a fire can take time to show up,” said Caroline. When she trailered the pony to the clinic,
she saw that this was true. “He looked burnt like a marshmallow: his hair was brown where it had been white. When they shaved it off, you could literally see the burn developing on his back: he started blistering and if you touched him you could feel that the flesh was not healthy.” Dr. Jacobs advised that thermal burns on a horse can take 24 to 36 hours to fully manifest themselves, much like a sunburn on human skin. Fortunately, Whistle’s burns did not end up being very deep, and after a few days of treatment his wounds scabbed over and he was on his way to a full recovery. The news of the fire spread rapidly through the Aiken and equestrian communities, and immediately the rescue was showered with offers of help. Monetary donations poured in through the website and Facebook page. Amy Hebert and Charles Doremus, who own Aiken Saddlery, opened up their store on Sunday – it was Easter Sunday – so that the rescue could get whatever feed and supplies it needed that day. Lowes
June-July 2021
