The colt was consumed by worry and ran in circles, whinnying and snorting and doing everything he could not to go any closer to the black hole. At one point he even tried to scale the fence by climbing up the rails, but all that did was skin up his legs and cause him to fall backwards landing first on his hip, then on his back. He quickly scrambled to his feet and began circling the other direction.

Tug understood the reason the colt wasn’t going any further was because of the way the inside of the trailer appeared to him. Being so early in the day, the inside of the high-sided, covered stock trailer was all in shadows and was very dark. He knew instinct wouldn’t allow the colt go into something that looked so unnatural, and he also knew he’d have a better chance of getting him inside if there was more light in there. After nearly forty minutes of the colt circling, scaling the fence and circling some more, Tug did what he wished he would have done to start with. He went to the passenger side of the trailer, up by the front, and opened the escape door, which allowed sunlight to fill the nose of the trailer. Almost as soon as the interior of the trailer lit up, the colt turned and looked toward it.

Light at the end of a dark tunnel means the same to a horse as it does to a human—a way out. The colt, extremely wary of the narrow chute he would need to pass through to get to the apparent opening, chose to go forward rather than stay. No sooner had he entered the chute than another gate closed behind him, blocking any escape other than the one directly in front of him. The metal chute clattered loudly under his feet and caused him to nervously scamper across it all the way to the step he would need to take to get inside the trailer. Every eight feet or so, another gate had closed behind him, this time sliding in from the side as opposed to swinging closed, as the others had.

Finally, he stood in an eight-foot-long, six-foot-tall, three-foot-wide opening with the light of the escape door nearly twenty feet away inside the trailer. The last gate to close behind him began sliding back and forth, six inches at a time, making a loud clanging noise as it did. The noise heightened the colt’s worry, and he tried to go over the top of the chute rather than go into the trailer and toward the light. Finally, after six attempts at going over the top, and seeing nothing he was doing to try to escape was working, he sunk his whole body down about as low as it would go, and with the gate behind him banging and clanging, he launched himself into the trailer. He no sooner landed inside than the light from the escape door went out.