Page 12 - 7 July 2012

KARMA
Remembering the Golden Rule.
“Do unto others as you would have them do to you.”
by Stacy Pigott
The call came early one morning, before my alarm had even gone off. I groggily picked up the phone and saw my neighbor’s number flashing at me. Fear shot through me as I imagined she was calling to tell me one of my animals was hurt...or worse...in my pasture. I quickly answered and was relieved to hear the problem was a few loose horses—and they weren’t mine.
“Call the sheriff,” I said, and rolled over to catch a few minutes of shut eye before officially starting the day. But I couldn’t sleep. The problem of three loose horses kept nagging at me. If they had been mine, I would have wanted someone to do something. So I got up and got dressed, calling my neighbor back in the process.
The sheriff was on his way, and the horses were relatively stationary, happily grazing in another neighbor’s backyard. We canvassed the neighborhood, checking every house that we knew had horses. No luck. So where did these three horses come from?
The decision was made to catch the horses—which were all fat, happy and healthy. These were not horses that had been dumped—a growing problem in Texas as hay prices remain high and many owners can no longer afford to feed their animals. They all proved to have excellent ground manners. Somebody, some- where, cared about these horses.
A third neighbor had joined the efforts, and volun- teered her roundpen. The horses were contained, fed and watered. The sheriff had our contact numbers in case anyone called. There didn’t seem to be much more we could do but wait.
Noticing one of the horses recently had stitches removed from his shoulder, I decided to call a few
of the larger vet clinics in the area, hoping someone would recognize the horses. It was a longshot, and
it didn’t work, as each clinic responded with the
same answer—we see too many horses in one day to remember each individual animal. Then I had another thought...Facebook! Quickly logging on, I posted a note on my wall about the loose horses. I picked a few select people from my list of friends and shared the item on their walls as well, knowing each of them had a very wide circle of friends in the local area. It was, I thought, another longshot.
Five minutes later, my phone rang.
The man calling had seen my post on a mutual friend’s page. He wasn’t certain the horses were his—while he hadn’t seen his horses that morning, he figured they were just on the other side of their nearly 40-acre pasture. When I said there were three, he got
worried. I started to describe them: “An older bay gelding...” he interrupted me, saying, “and a grey and a dun mare.” Yep, owner found. Turns out a tree had been uprooted during the recent storms, damaging his fence line enough for the horses to escape. He would, he said, be right over.
The ironic part of the whole deal is neither the owner nor I had ever met, in person, the mutual Facebook friend who made the connection. It was a true “friend-of-a-friend” situation, the likes of which happen increasingly often on Facebook. But when I met the owner as he loaded up his horses to take them home, I knew I had seen him before.
Later, I realized where. Last year, during the epic ice storm that raged through north Texas, my well froze and I had been without water for two days. On the third day, the weather lifted enough for me to try to make it to town. I made it about a half-mile before my truck got stuck on the ice. A nice man stopped and pulled my truck onto dry ground, allowing me to safely turn around and head home. That nice man was, of course, the owner of the loose horses.
There is an Indian religious concept known
as karma—a natural universal law in which cause and effect direct the entire cycle of life. If you do good, you can expect good karma to return to you. Conversely, evil actions result in bad karma. You may have also heard the concept explained as “what goes around, comes around.” I prefer the Biblical state- ment: “Do unto others as you would have them do
to you.” No matter how you look at it, the owner, by doing a good deed for me, had goodness returned to him when I was able to play a small role in returning his loose horses safely to him.
In these tumultuous times, it is easy to become selfish and self-centered as we focus on the simple act of surviving. So many of us are so overwhelmed with our own problems that it’s hard to see past our daily to-do list. Then, when you do look up, you see an industry full of strife and negativity. As we struggle to make a living in an industry under attack, it can be hard to think about helping someone else when we can barely help ourselves.
My challenge to you today is to wake up, take a deep breath, look up and, when you have the chance, do something good for someone else. Whether or not you believe in karma or the Golden Rule, our world— and Quarter Horse racing—could always use a little more goodness along the way.
12 SPEEDHORSE, July 6, 2012
UNDER WRAPS