To the casual observer, the old gelding had looked perfectly normal that day. The people passing by or looking in on the colt in the pen next to him saw nothing at all out of the ordinary. In one instance when Tug went past, Zip had been eating. In another instance when Ben came by to toss hay, he was standing with his eyes closed, resting. In reality the pain in his hindquarters that day had been so bad his gut had begun to shut down. A gas bubble had developed in his large intestine, and another in his small intestine, which wasn’t allowing the digested waste matter coming from his stomach to ultimately be expelled. Waste matter backed up behind the gas bubbles, which made him acutely uncomfortable, and in an attempt to relieve the pain in his gut, the old horse got down and rolled. It had been everything he could do just to get down on the ground and back up, but by the time he did, he had signed his own death warrant. The act of rolling caused a section of his bowel to loop around the gas bubble, and when he stood, the weight of the full intestine behind the bubble pinched the looped intestine and closed it down completely. As the sun began to set, the final hours of the old gelding’s life painfully started ticking away.

The colt instinctively knew something was wrong with the old horse, but he could only watch helplessly as all during the night he threw himself down on the ground and thrashed violently in the dirt of his pen. From time to time Zip would stop long enough to let out a breathless groan as he lay on his side, caked in sweat-soaked dirt, then he would begin thrashing again. Just before dawn, after a full night of tortuous suffering, the gelding’s thrashing quieted, and then stopped altogether. By seven-thirty that morning, when Ben came by to toss the two of them their morning ration of hay, the old horse had already been dead for three-and-a-half hours.

The smell of death and the fact the colt was unable to get away from it made him uneasy, a fact made worse by the steady stream of humans that came by to gaze upon the lifeless body of the old horse in the pen next to him. It was strange to the colt that the humans that passed by the old gelding’s pen day in and day out when he was alive, without so much as a glance in his direction, would now come and gather around his corpse, standing for long periods of time, sadly looking down on him and talking amongst themselves in hushed tones.