Back during my time at Webb I had the amazing opportunity to TLC or Tender Love and Care on a few horses who didn’t have leasers. This was a non riding contract and it gave you free reign to care for the horse on the ground as if it was your lease. I loved this TLC program and would love to build my own with tools to support the best care for the equines and best education for the humans involved. That being said, today we’re meeting Caz.

I know we’ve technically talked about him time and time again, he’s the centerfold to a lot of my posts actually, but today it’s all about him. This has been a truly difficult piece to put together for me, so I’ve held off for so long, but it’s time.

Back in May 2018, just after lunch I had some free time and decided to go into the herd to see which horse I wanted to TLC after Wonka. I was looking for something like my connection with Wonks, so I thought about Stanley and Renaldo. Renaldo was ultimately sold and immediately Stanley got a Mom and daughter duo leaser pair. Both great geldings, but clearly they weren’t meant to be my match. So I dug some more and drifted over to the only black and white paint gelding available on the TLC board, Caz. I was hoping I would be able to tap into my family’s obsession with black and white paints and ideally make it my own with him.

I knew him from my daily supplements, and lessons and I knew he was a bit of a hard shelled man on the exterior. He was low on the pecking order in the pasture, and his friends were mostly the older ladies like Tilly or Mr Peabody an Appaloosa gelding with string halt. He and his friends were the perfect match. He fell so low in the pecking order because he spent the majority of the year in a stall away from everyone.

He had suffered a kick to the face and when he came out for a lesson or supplements he presented with a shifted eye position. Upon further vet testing he was CT scanned and they identified an orbital fracture from the kick causing the shift in the eye. He still had full vision and use of the eye, but he now had a larger eye corner for debris, flies etc. Down below are the photos from Steinbeck during the process.

So figuring out why he fell so low on the pecking order in the herd made sense. If I had a classmate kick me in the eye and then I was separated from everyone, I would be pretty grumpy too. On May 17, 2018, I finally had my first go at him. I took some homemade horse cookies out to the catch corral, and took the photo below of him.

For a while I thought maybe his nose went crooked from the kick too, but it’s just his fun face marking swooping from one side to the next throwing me off. He stood so tall, the wind ruffled his mane and it was like he said “okay we can try to be friends” with his perky ears.

Overtime, people began to tell me more and more about Caz, where he came from, what he did etc, and let me tell you, he’s quite a guy and you’d have no idea. He spent most of his late teens and twenties teaching little ones how to trot on a forward horse, but in his hay day he was quite the dressage star. I touched on that a little bit in our one year anniversary post, but I could totally see him rocking the sandbox. It made me want to rock the sandbox, and maybe one day I will.

Aside from the little riders that would come to use him, Caz had a chill life on the ranch. I gave him all the baths and grooming sessions, he got probably a little too many snacks, grain buckets, free walks over to the beet pulp and all of the cookies, but he so deserved them.

We got to the point where he would snake through the pasture to see me, just to say hi, get scratches and cuddles while defending my space for me. I would get playfully yelled at to “stop taking pictures of Caaaaazzzz” while doing work tasks just because I loved him so much. I would find him to cry on after a hard day. I would drive out 60 miles total just to see him on my days off from work. I included him in every blog post and he ultimately got Grey2Bay the viewers we have today and I couldn’t be more grateful for his presence in my life and journey. But unfortunately, all good things must come to an end and I started formally leasing Capone to ride and it forced me to pick Caz or Capone. With that was also the decision to leave Webb as a barn manager and pursue another career. This meant not only did I break off my TLC with Caz, but I wouldn’t see him again or have access to him. That was one of the hardest things I ever did.

We talked about his eye, but we didn’t talk about one of the biggest things that brought us together, our flymask.

I want to preface this story by saying our ranch got so dry in the summer that the dirt road into the barn had become a skate park. It was so bad and so dry that I cracked my radiator in my car, and basically had to retire it and buy a new car. With that came the dust bowl as I called it since the car wheels would tear up the skate park dunes and send it right into the active stable areas and pastures. This meant fly masks weren’t just for flies anymore, it was for dirt and sunburn too.

I took extra precautions when choosing the flymask I wanted for Caz due to his leaky eye and extra pocket in the eye corner for debris. As outlined in this post, I opted to buy the Fleece Flymask with ears in Razzleberry. It worked so well, until someone decided to bite the velcro during a play session and rip the mesh right off the straps. I found the mask abandoned in the dirt during round up and a naked faced Caz staring back at me. I told him he lost his rights, but I quickly grabbed a new flymask from a horse that didn’t need it as badly and threw it on his face for protection. Any photos of Caz with Dallas’ flymask are from this time in limbo. Unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier I pivoted my priorities and ultimately left Caz behind so I never got him a new mask, I just kept our old ripped one.

By the time I knew Caz I knew he would be a forever lesson horse, I knew I wasn’t in a position to buy him from the program, so our goodbye was a true genuine goodbye. However, I still had friends and saw social media posts of the herd and could still pick him out in the herd in the background. I was a creeper when it came to him, because he was my pride and joy after working so hard for months to crack him open and find the sweet gelding inside who just wanted to be loved. I have a couple photos like the terrible blurry one below, just screenshotted in time so I knew he was all good happy and alive.

I knew one day it would happen, I just really would’ve preferred a different outcome, but Caz had to be put down this year.

Earlier this year EHV-1 tormented Webb and other local barns taking horses left and right through the ringer with health issues, isolation and quarantine, daily rectal temperature checks and in a decent amount of cases they were put down. Unfortunately, somehow, Caz seemed to be patient zero at Webb. He hadn’t been exposed to a show that had it, he hadn’t left the property in a while as far as I was aware, it just sat and festered overtime until it revealed itself way passed treating. I got a DM saying Caz passed a couple days before, which I will be forever grateful for, but it tied in with the equine pandemic so I knew that’s what it was. The CDC and local veterinarians put out the statement above regarding a paint gelding with neurological symptoms and I was crushed. Still thinking about it messes me up, which is why this “Meet Caz” post is so difficult.

After some time has passed, I will be doing a huge post on EHV/EHM in the near future. But, please make sure you guys are practicing safe quarantine rules for new horses at the barn, check your currently boarded horses vaccinations and take precautions at shows to limit the spread of germs.

That being said, CazCaz was the best horse for me to learn and grow with before jumping into leasing and eventually buying. I will forever be grateful for our short time together, even if it doesn’t feel like it was enough. And I hope he knows he is one of my heart horses. Rest easy buddy, I miss you.