The two horses looked like they had never seen anything like it. They had wound up in a dark car park renowned for the practice known as ‘dogging’ after being found wandering perilously close to the M25.
A jockey who just happened to be passing — ahem — was holding on to them as the usual nocturnal customers of this beauty spot carried on doing what they do.
The police were out in force, busy trying to solve this baffling crime. We arrived after getting a call from a neighbouring horse owner warning us that horses in our area were loose. After racing to our fields around 9 p.m. to find them all peacefully grazing, our fences and gates intact, we set about joining a group who had gathered to help.
Three livery yard owners were there, one being the chap who received the original call from the police when the horses were first spotted near the hard shoulder. The officer had ripped a strip off him, and he had had to explain that all his charges were safely tucked up in bed in their stables. However, he then rang us and we rang more people and someone put it on Facebook.
It was pitch dark in the car park — or Public Sex Environment, as the police prefer to call it — when we began gathering in the picnic area where the jockey was holding the horses. Both were in expensive fly rugs, immaculately groomed, with glossy coats and well-trimmed hooves. Somebody loved these horses. Any fool could see that they were treasured and cared for. Not the police officer in charge, however, who, as the builder boyfriend and I approached him, bellowed at us: ‘Are you the owner?’
We explained we had come to help. ‘Well,’ he harrumphed with considerable steam, ‘let me tell you that when we get hold of these people we are going to throw the book at them!’ He had one of those comedy PC Plod accents. I took a deep breath. ‘Yes, or,’ I said firmly, ‘you could consider whether walkers left one of their field gates open.’
He stared back dumbfounded. I explained we were all experiencing an unprecedented number of incidents in which horses, cows and other livestock had been found wandering about where they shouldn’t be after footpath gates had been left open by people visiting the countryside during lockdown.
PC Plod’s mouth was now hanging open. ‘We are all under siege,’ I explained. ‘We have had no help from the authorities. The footpaths through our fields are inundated with people who leave the rights-of-way gates open. The footpaths near livestock should have been closed.’ And I swear he said this, with a sarcastic tone: ‘Well then why didn’t you close them?’
I explained with as much patience as I could muster that the law doesn’t allow you just to close a footpath. It was better when stiles were the norm, of course, but more usually these days we must leave a small gate that opens so that all-comers can walk through in a multi-user, equality-focused sort of way.
And of course these gates are habitually not closed. ‘In fact, I know of a family with horses on their property not five minutes from here,’ I told the open-mouthed cop, ‘who have been so desperate that they parked a muck trailer in front of their footpath gate the other day, but the next day we noticed they had been forced to remove it. If you want my opinion, I would start with that family.’
This blew his mind to the extent that the BB and I got in our car and drove round to this house ourselves and knocked on their door but there was no answer.
When we got back, the horses were being loaded into an enormous horse lorry. I asked where they were going. ‘I’m afraid I am not at liberty to divulge that,’ said PC Plod, pompously.
All around him, drunk, stoned men were hooking up with each other and disappearing into the bushes. The BB made a sarcastic comment and I had to shush him because you could see the officer was going to arrest him for some kind of hate crime if he didn’t shut up and pretend it wasn’t happening.
The ramp went up on the lorry, the two horses kicked and panicked. I all but burst into tears. And then, behold, a miracle happened. Someone had come forward on Facebook. The owner had been found. She was on her way. I heard a policewoman saying into her phone: ‘And bring the passports with you so we can verify you are the real owner.’
Yes, because we wouldn’t want someone to pretend to be the horse owner whose worst nightmare had almost come true and in addition to that was about to get the book thrown at them by the police.
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