The owner of a horse recovering from laminitis who was let out of his bare paddock on to 15 acres of grass has spray-painted the words “Don’t feed me” on her horse’s sides.
Johanna Bayliss-Fuller told H&H she was “at her wits’ end” after years of dealing with members of the public feeding her four horses, breaking her fences and trespassing in her fields. She has put up sign after sign, posted on local Facebook groups and spoken to some of those responsible, to no avail.
A fortnight ago, someone took down the electric fence confining 19-year-old cob Donkey to his small paddock, in which he was being fed and hayed twice a day, allowing him access to acres of grass.
“He’s very much in fat camp and I hate it; if he could be out in the paddock, he would be, but he can’t,” Johanna said. “He loves grass, a little too much, but it doesn’t love him back, so he may be sad about it but it’s the only way to keep him alive.
“He doesn’t understand that, and unfortunately people walking the footpath don’t either.”
Johanna has been renting the land, in Dedham, Essex, for about 10 years, during which time the area has become more popular with tourists.
The fields have a footpath running through them, and Johanna said: “I’ve done everything. Signs, nice messages on Facebook, I’ve had some less than pleasant interactions with people who think they can wander up the field and say ‘I just wanted to feed the horses some apples’.
“Now, you have to walk past five slightly more in-depth signs, explaining that one has laminitis, one has no front teeth, feeding could cause them to fight, and a little countryside how-to, about closing gates and leaving no mess. But the Friday before last, I came back to find someone had pulled out all the electric fence posts and let him out.”
Donkey had developed laminitis about five weeks beforehand, and as it had been caught early, and Johanna had acted appropriately, he was at the point where he felt sound, and she had hoped to be able to increase his exercise, which would also help in his recovery.
“I was so upset; I’d ridden him the evening before and thought ‘We’re nearly there’,” she said. “People don’t comprehend that this is literally life or death, you’re walking on a tightrope all the time.”
The extra grass did not seem to put Donkey’s recovery back, but Johanna said she was lucky, also owing to the other possible outcomes.
“It’s not that the grass will kill him, it’s that I could find him with his pedal bone rotated through his feet and have to have him put down,” she said. “I’ve got three others out there; a 14.2hh stallion who fights with this one, ; they could get cuts or it could be a broken leg. I’ve got a 22-year-old with arthritic changes, who could have been made lame. The only possible positive outcome is that that person felt pleased with themselves; every other possible outcome is detrimental and it could have wiped out four horses.”
Thinking that “desperate times call for desperate measures”, Johanna bought some agricultural spray and put the sign on Donkey himself.
“I couldn’t make it any more obvious,” she said, adding that the reaction has been mainly positive.
“I feel like it might actually have got the message across,” she said. “Once on a post, someone said I came across patronising but I’m at the point I don’t care what people think of me, I just want my horses alive and sound.
“But this time, the reaction has been very supportive. One person on Facebook said I wasn’t being very nice and I said it’s not very nice to find a horse with a rotated pedal bone or a broken leg or choked to death. Someone else said it didn’t look very nice, but I said it looks better than him being dead and buried, because those are the options. But I do think it’s worked.”
Johanna said she hopes Donkey will come back into work, adding that she would like to take him autumn hunting this year, but said: “If I don’t, I don’t. He owes me nothing and I owe him everything.”
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