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| Courtney Whitacre placed 13th in horsemanship with a little help from a good friend. |
Courtney Whitacre had a guardian angel this week at the Ford Youth World.
On August 1, the day before she and her horse Tail Of The Century were to load up and haul from their home in Smithville, Missouri, to Fort Worth, “Jessie” colicked.
“When my trainer went to feed him, she noticed he had cuts on him,” Courtney said. Jessie had apparently been colicking all night. Courtney’s trainer, Stacey Roberson, immediately called the vet.
“He was really sore on his stomach and gut,” Courtney said. “They gave him some sedation to calm him down and it hung on for a couple of minutes, but not as long as it should have.”
Stacey and the vet called Courtney’s parents and decided to haul him to the clinic in Raytown.
“Me and my dad waited for them, and Stacey pulled in with the trailer and they got him out and gave him as much sedation as they could. They took him into surgery at 10:45 and by 12:15 they came out, and they told us that he wasn’t going to make it.”
Jessie’s large colon had wrapped around his intestines twice. There was nothing that could be done.
Courtney went in the operating room and said goodbye to the horse she had owned and loved for 7 years.
Courtney wasn’t going to show at the Youth World, but she thought she’d maybe still come support her friends.
“Some friends of mine were going to come down on Sunday,” she said. “They rope and do fun stuff, so I thought that would be perfect. I’d ride down with them and then leave.”
But then her parents called AQHA. Because Jessie had died, Courtney had the option of showing her second horse, 5-year-old Secret Chex, who was qualified in the equitation, in the classes she was to ride Jessie in.
“So I thought, we’ll see.”
They hauled to Fort Worth and started practicing for horsemanship and trail.
“We started practicing and realized the horsemanship pattern was good for her,” Courtney said. “I hadn’t shown her in horsemanship or the trail in over a year. That was really hard. It started to remind me that every time I rode, Jessie was with me, just kind of always there.”
Courtney was realistic all week about her chances at the Youth World. She knew horsemanship and trail were new to her mare, so she was happy with any good performance. She never expected to make the finals in horsemanship, where she placed 13th in the class of 113 entries.
“Everything we did, I was just like, we’ll go in, we’ll try it and we’ll see how it goes,” she said.
“Then horsemanship went really well, trail, really well. All these things went really well. Any time we went in the pen, she did it. You could just tell somebody had talked to her before we got there. I think Jessie gave her a pep talk.”
