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Sheyenne's Adventure

by Lannette Abbey

I am a day late, but as promised, here is the story of Sheyenne and his adventure with the calf-release chute. When I get home from work I will usually spend a few minutes in the house, checking the mail, greeting the dogs and cats, changing clothes, etc. You know the routine. By the time I am finished with all of that, the horses are up at the arena fence waiting for me to come outside. One day last summer, I got home from work, went through my usual routine and noticed that Sheyenne was not at the fence as usual. He was at the far end of the arena ignoring that fact that I was home. So, I watched him for a few minutes and noticed that he wasn't moving at all, he was just standing there. This is not normal behavior for him, so I went out to see what was up. Low and behold, I got down to the end of the arena to find him stuck in the calf-release chute. Sheyenne had not only walked into the release end of the chute to graze on some luscious green grass, he had walked right through into the next section of the alleyway. It is made out of steel oil pipe and has a cross member across the top and across the bottom about 6-inches off the ground at either end of an 8-foot section. After the release chute there are two 8-foot sections then a 90-degree turn and a few more sections. Well, the cross-member on the top was just a couple or four inches lower than the top of Sheyenne's big round rear end. So, he couldn't back out and hadn't figured out how to duck his head enough to walk through the rest of the way. Now, here I am no one around to help with this 1000 pound animal in a situation that I wasn't sure how to resolve. I envisioned the TV show Animal Rescues with the fire department coming out with sirens blaring, calling in a helicopter to lift him out, so on and so forth. You can use your imagination from there.

I thought to myself, there is no way I am going to call the fire department. I live in a volunteer fire district, so I didn't have a lot of confidence in their expertise with this type of rescue. So, I called my daughter and her boyfriend for some help. While I waited for them to make the 30 minute drive, I looked over the situation further. I tried to get Sheyenne to lower his head enough to get under the top cross-member and step over the lower one to get into the next section. (I'm not sure he could have negotiated that 90-degree turn anyway.) I tried to get him to lower his rear end and back out, but couldn't figure out how to get him to step up over the lower bar and drop his rear at the same time. That is when I noticed that the alleyway was made in sections that were wired together. OK, now we're getting somewhere. I just need to unwire the section in front of Sheyenne, pull it out of the way and get him to duck and step over only one set of bars. Yes! I can do this. So, I started dismantling the alleyway in front of him. About the time my help arrived, I had unwired all four corners of the front section. Well, at the far end of this section there is a hitching post type thing at right angles to the section on both sides. So, it required that we pull that section to the side and forward at the same time to ease it out. We tried our best to move this section, but that steel oil pipe is pretty darn heavy. We couldn't budge it.

OK, the next brainy idea is to hook it up to the rear of the truck and drag it out. Yeah, that should work. So, we got the section hooked up to the truck, all the while Sheyenne is looking at us wondering why we haven't gotten him out of this mess, yet. It was time for dinner.

On TV, they always blindfold the horse to keep them calm, so I got the halter and lead rope on Sheyenne, put a makeshift blindfold on him. Then my daughter and I got into position on either side of Sheyenne to help keep him calm and her boyfriend got in the truck to pull the section out. Well, as soon as he started pulling, Sheyenne decided he had had enough of that and reared up a couple of times finally getting his front feet up on top of the section. John had seen what was happening and had stopped pulling. Sheyenne had, with his first rearing, managed to come down close to the side of the chute and momentarily pinned my arm between him and the chute. (It was pretty stupid of me to have my arm on the inside of the chute anyway.) I got the blindfold pulled off, backed away, and let him have at it. He managed in short order to climb the rest of the way out of the alleyway and didn't even move that section. I looked him over, he was a little excited, but seemed no worse for wear, no cuts, scrapes or other apparent injuries. So, off he trotted to dinner. I ended up with a major bruise on the underneath side of my arm, but it wasn't broken, so I felt fortunate. I have since wired the front end of that release chute closed as I am not a roper and don't care to go through that experience again. They are mischievous and cleaver animals.

If you have an animal tale that you would like to share, please send it via e-mail to info@abbeyranch.com. Animal Tales from the Heart will become a monthly feature of abbeyranch.com as long as we have material to publish. Abbeyranch reserves the right to edit submissions for grammar, clarity, and to ensure content is appropriate for all audiences. All stories submitted must be your original work.