When we fulfilled our daughter’s dream of a pony for her eleventh birthday, my husband and I assumed we were “one and done.” But, as all horse owners learn, it’s hard to have a single equine. Within weeks of our mare’s arrival, we received offers for various pals to keep her company. A couple of candidates came and went. And then, we met Pumpkin.
A miniature orange and white paint with a history of hoof disease called founder, Pumpkin needed a new home. He was a fat four-year-old gelding—the equivalent of an overweight preschooler with a chronic eating issue. His busy owner offered him to us for free if we would address the founder and give him the attention she could not.
We drove across the county on a bright winter day to see him, and he was oh-so-cute. His thick, two-colored tail swept the ground as he quickstepped along the fence line, regarding us with one big blue eye and one brown. We laughed at his high-pitched whinny, more of a shrill squeal than a neigh.
A half-horse, as our daughter dubbed him, Pumpkin seemed docile enough, and he was certainly short if not svelte. Her pony would enjoy the companionship, and we would give Pumpkin a good life. How much trouble could a plump mini horse be?
We soon found out. He may have stood only forty inches high, but his diminutive frame housed the heart of a Percheron stallion. While he gave due deference to the lead mare in their herd of two, he set out to be the ruling monarch of us all.
Not that my besotted husband minded. Just looking at Pumpkin transported my spouse back to summer visits on his aunt’s farm in Maryland where she raised Chincoteague ponies. He phoned his parents, asking them to send a small saddle.
And he gave Pumpkin a nickname: “The Prince of the Meadow.” Each morning before work, he walked to the barn with a carrot to say hello. He roughed up Pumpkin’s mane, rubbed his withers, and leaned over to whisper “You’re the Prince” in his ear. (I always thought the name “Loki,” after the wily Norse god of mayhem, would be more appropriate. In public, I referred to Pumpkin as our yard art—attractive but useless.)
I realized early on that Pumpkin believed minis were not meant for riding. Or showing. Or even leading. Minis exist to do whatever they want and to make people smile, nothing more. They eat, sleep, and play—not necessarily with us.
Our first attempt to saddle Pumpkin also became our last. We thought he would enjoy giving a ride to our seven-year-old son, who weighed less than a meager fifty pounds. It was a toss-up as to who was less enthused, mini-man or mini-mount.
Pumpkin hopped and bucked and tried to shake the saddle off his back, so we should not have been surprised when he did the same with our son. The boy lasted all of five seconds atop the tiny steed, and we never got him on a horse again. To this day, he enjoys them from a distance.
Pumpkin’s favorite pastime (other than eating) was scratching his itches on our hog-wire fence. The six-inch-square wire openings functioned as a multi-broad-handed masseuse. Pumpkin scraped his head and neck or his shoulders and flanks against the taut wires, but he especially relished wagging his wide rump back and forth across them like a fat windshield wiper.
In the spring, the wire holes also acted as defoliators for his thick winter coat. Pumpkin spread his shedding self all along our fence line, much to the delight of the birds who lined their nests with his soft fur and long strands from his tail. While I fretted over the unsightly orange and white explosions of horsehair that hugged our property, my daughter and husband just chuckled and called each gift a “Pumpkin patch.”
The scamp’s innate curiosity and overconfidence got him into repeated trouble. One balmy afternoon while we focused our attention on fence post repairs, Pumpkin ambled over to the electric golf cart we used for hauling our supplies. A bit of snooping led to stepping—right up onto the floor of the vehicle where he somehow hit the gas pedal with his front feet.
We looked up in time to see our fearless mini gazing over the wheel of the golf cart and driving straight toward a section of fence. Helpless, we watched him slam into the wire and squirt out the side of the cart on impact. He took a quick look around, shook himself off, and returned to grazing—clearly hoping there were no witnesses.
Whenever a gate was left open (or was opened by the imp of mischief), our pair of prancers skipped out of their four-acre haven and roamed down the cove, visiting one green lawn after another. That first summer, the visits were so frequent that our neighbors set up a phone relay. We exchanged numbers, and helpful spotters called around to indicate the direction the horses were heading. By the fall, we knew every homeowner in our subdivision.
On his way down our lane, Pumpkin liked to stop at my bird feeders for a quick snack of seeds and fruit. Our first indicator of an equine breakout often came from a glance out the kitchen window. Broken feeders hanging at odd angles or strewn across the lawn usually meant a horse hunt unless we could catch him in the act before he bolted.
When he wasn’t marauding, Pumpkin enjoyed the sunflowers I planted on the west side of the barn in the dry lot—he ate them down to nubs. He also snatched big mouthfuls of my mums any time he was led past them from the barn to the round corral. His position of choice seemed to be head-down with jaws working.
We quickly realized we would need to invest in the same kind of training for The Prince that we were giving our pony: expensive and time-consuming but successful. Without it, we’d own a well-behaved adult and an ill-mannered juvenile delinquent. Our talented daughter put her natural horsemanship education to work on her second student.
First, she introduced some basic social skills like respecting her space and yielding to pressure. As soon as Pumpkin could follow her lead consistently, she treated him like a big herding dog and gave him jobs. Once he realized a horse treat might be the payoff for his chores, he followed her around like a puppy.
She filled a burlap feed sack with empty cans and taught her mouthy mini to fetch. Soon he retrieved anything we threw out in the dry lot: the sack of cans, a ball cap, a glove. He even learned to bring in the hard rubber feed bins after each feeding. After carrying them one at a time between his teeth, he released the prize to one of her hands—so long as he spied his treat in the other.
In addition, Pumpkin learned to put his front feet on a pedestal (benefitting, no doubt, from his experience with the golf cart) and to hop atop the wooden plinth on all fours and pose for a photo. Using a twenty-two-foot lead rope, his savvy trainer convinced him to jump the logs we scattered in the meadow, even though he preferred to walk along the tops of them like a sure-footed billy goat on a balance beam.
Unfortunately, we were less successful at getting him to give up grass. While our pony came running at her owner’s first whistle, Pumpkin acted like he didn’t even hear her. He pushed his face deeper into the green carpet and grazed away at the sweet, sugary blades. Our grass hound’s founder problems went from bad to worse. We tried one farrier and then another. We learned there are multiple schools of thought to treating founder, and we dabbled in all of them. Finally, our favorite farrier told us we would never solve the hoof problem until we addressed the food problem by banning The Prince from the meadow.
We set up a lightweight electric wire enclosure inside our big dry lot. But the grass sirens still called to Pumpkin. As winter brought cold temperatures and a thick protective coat to our mini, he simply ducked underneath the wire and accepted the brief sizzle on his back and neck as the price to enter the pasture.
We added a second lower strand to keep him from scooting underneath the first. Clever Pumpkin started testing the fence to see if it was on. Approaching the two strands with due respect, he listened for the faint humming noise from the current. If he didn’t hear it, he stretched out his neck to touch the wire with his nose. No shock, no fence. He plowed it down without apology.
Despite our diligent attempts to keep him on a strict diet and off the grass, we didn’t see immediate results. So we congratulated ourselves when Pumpkin started to slim down—until he kept losing weight, a lot of it. His movements became uncoordinated, and he had no strength in his hind legs. He walked with an odd wobble, if he walked at all, and he held his neck bowed inward and his feet splayed outward trying to maintain his equilibrium.
Our vet said nothing while he examined Pumpkin. The symptoms pointed to EPM, equine protozoal myeloencephalitis, a degenerative neurological disease spread by the saliva or feces of wild opossums. The prognosis wasn’t good, and at this stage of the illness, the doctor gave Pumpkin a 50/50 chance of survival. He left us a special powder and a paste to administer faithfully, which our daughter did for weeks. Her dad visited the patient daily to offer a rub of encouragement or a carrot, which Pumpkin refused—a sure sign of his distress. We missed the sound of his quick-trotting steps and his wee whinnies. We worried and prayed.
But time and attention and the wise council of our vet and farrier won out. And some unexpected benefits came from the ordeal. After Pumpkin was forced to rest and eat only what he was fed, his hooves grew back to nearly normal as he got stronger. And he never regained all his previous weight, which left him healthier than he had been prior to his sickness.
Post EPM, the close bond between my husband and my daughter deepened as they shared their joy in The Prince’s recovery. They took impromptu pictures of our brave survivor and texted them to each other. The horse’s name appeared painted on a large board above his stall. Orange pumpkin cutouts decorated the walls, high enough to be unreachable by small inquisitive teeth.
My doting spouse gave our firstborn a six-inch Schleich model horse that looked just like Pumpkin, and the figure started popping up in all kinds of places inside our house as they took turns hiding and finding the toy. Soon my son and I joined the game we called “Where’s Pumpkin?” Whoever found him hid him next. That Christmas our daughter made her dad a hardback book of the same name filled with photos of all the locations “little Pumpkin” had visited during the year.
Not to be outdone, the real Pumpkin also invaded our house. His resident trainer decided to see if she could get him to approach and enter through the back door. Standing to one side of him, she raised the lead rope toward the open doorway and exerted slight pressure forward. He ambled across the threshold, walked through the foyer into the kitchen, and looked around with interest as if he might join us for breakfast. We gave him some treats and took a snapshot for our fridge, where his royal visage could greet us every morning.
While one of our children was building her life around horses, the other built his in the theater. And before long, the two intersected. When the local high school teacher who cast our son as Will Parker in Oklahoma needed a barnyard scene in her lobby, she asked our family to create an interactive display with animals. We built a life-size barn wall next to the ticket booth and got permission to fence in a square section of tiled floor and fill it with hay—and Pumpkin.
Rabbits, chickens, and a rooster peered at him from their cages along one side of the pen. Our cheerful mini rested his chin on the wooden rails and accepted as his right the pats of hundreds of patrons throughout five public performances. At the end of the theater season, we brought home three coveted regional awards, including one for Best Lobby Design.
Years later, Pumpkin made another house call during the first summer we faced the monster COVID. My favorite clients at the First Regional Library system asked me to give educational presentations with my animal partners in a live Zoom format since we couldn’t meet as we usually did on-site at the individual branches.
The summer library reading theme was Fables and Fairy Tales, and I titled my opening Zoom program “Princes, Princesses, and Ponies.” I asked my daughter for footage of her horses, who had multiplied again and now numbered four. She created a magical PowerPoint for me highlighting their unique traits and explaining to viewers why each one reminded her of a different Walt Disney steed.
She showed several engaging videos of her equine friends, and we crowned the hour-long program with our live surprise guest, Pumpkin. He sailed through the familiar back door, stepped onto the blankets we spread along his path “just in case,” clopped through the kitchen, the den, and down a hall past three bedrooms to enter my office. Once he arrived, he blew out a whuffle of air and waited, gently swishing his magnificent tail and stretching his nose toward the camera. We tossed a ball cap on the carpet, and he did his best retriever imitation a few times (for a horse treat, of course). He stayed and visited for about ten minutes before returning the way he came—no fuss, no attitude, no accidents. First a thespian and now a movie actor, The Prince proved what he already knew—he was the star, the reigning monarch.
Today, at twenty-two, Pumpkin still rules the barnyard. Our daughter likes to say she owns three and a half horses. But what a half! He rears up on stout little legs to nip the necks of both my daughter’s big geldings and delights in dodging around their legs, trying to agitate them into play.
He also resides in a stall with the old blind mare who first welcomed him to her meadow. He serves her now as a stalwart partner, sharing her hay manger, giving her grace when she bumps into him, and protecting her from the horse in the stall next to them by administering a swift bite if the usurper threatens his pony pal.
For a little horse who has never been shown, never competed in a horse event, and never been ridden (for long), Pumpkin has added colorful and unexpected threads to the patchwork quilt of our family story. Sometimes a rescued animal fills our lives in places we didn’t even know were empty.
Pumpkin did.