27/05/2024
Many of you have already heard, but for those who haven’t, a great tragedy happened here just over two weeks ago. My beautiful dream and beloved companion Om El Najeeb Dream (Jeebie) coliced and had to be put down. We were several hours away at a horse show and my animal caretaker sent me a panicked message that we needed a vet for Jeebie, who was down outside the barn when she came to feed in the morning. I called a horsey neighbor friend who quickly came to help and wait for the vet, and another joined her to comfort him as I sat and helplessly watched on FaceTime. When the vet arrived, she determined that his leg was beyond repair and his vitals were very poor. We reviewed video footage when we returned home the next night and saw that he had coliced during the night, rolling violently in and out of his stall, taking out several rails under both sides of his fence and finally rolling under it to end up outside in our parking lot. If I had been home, I might have heard him due to it being a warm night and having my bedroom window open. Or if we had looked at our cameras at the right time. But fate had its way and he suffered alone until morning when his beautiful life was cut short just shy of age 19.
We had bought Jeebie in 2019. I had been looking for a stallion to breed a mare to that I was looking at. I ended up not buying the mare, but fell in love with him and his pedigree and bought him instead, buying him three “wives” to breed the following year. When we bought him, we put him in training to hopefully show, but he was so incredibly studdy he needed a month or more to just learn to be around other horses without trying to breed everything in sight. He came home after seven months primarily because he had cast himself in his stall and injured his tail head, and then he had mares to breed, three mine, and a few outside mares. My husband and I watched videos and read up, then proceeded to learn how to breed in hand! Jeebie was all business but never mean, never dangerous, just ready to go. We also went trail riding. I discovered he was bold and had very little spook, and after I won an argument about water early on, he’d go anywhere I asked him to. We gelded him in fall of 2022 after long deliberation. He wasn’t siring a lot of himself, and the foals heavily favored the mothers by my amateur eye. Plus we just weren’t breeding a lot, had decided to cut back to our one broodmare, he wasn’t homozygous black, was a CA carrier, sired more c**ts than fillies, and so on. It was discovered during the surgery that he had testicular cancer, so it was good we’d found it. After that, the stallion behavior faded away, to the point he could have a mare in heat have her butt in his face and he found it only mildly interesting. My 10yo daughter rode him ba****ck with a halter/leadrope out to pasture and back; my 14yo daughter, who is a somewhat timid rider, took him on a trail ride with me. He was easy to live with even when a stallion, never mean, and safe around kids and dogs. He was always happy to be out there seeing the sights, slopping through the mud, and galloping in his perfect cadence up the long hills. I was getting set up to train him to drive, but I never got the chance to. I try to remind myself that the price of loving deeply is to grieve deeply. I miss him every day when I see his empty stall or hug his beautiful chestnut daughter, fittingly named FHR Najeebs Lastdream, the only filly he ever graced me with. I never dreamed when I fell in love with his beautiful outside that I’d fall so hard for his beautiful inside 💔
