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THE
ADVOCATE-MESSENGER
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 24, 2002
Garrard
farm nurses horses back to health
By EVELYN GANDER
Staff Writer
BRYANTSVILLE
- It was a long shot that the quarterhorse caught in a fire
could heal. A long shot that the thoroughbred too scared to
be handled could change. Against the odds, Phoenix has a place
to recover, and Zoe has a place to be with other horses. Thanks
to Gillian Vallis who brought the two horses down the stretch
at Pine
Knoll Farm.
From start
to finish, Vallis didn't look at the odds. She just looked at
the horses.
That connection
spurred efforts that brought Vallis and her husband, Francis,
to Garrard County and the 130-acre farm they would buy. The
farm, the work years later to save Phoenix, the start of the
Four Harmony Foundation that fosters educational and rehabilitative
opportunities connected with horses started about 10 years ago.
And Vallis' efforts continued recently with the quarterhorse
who wasn't far from Pine Knoll Farm.
In the
fall of last year, she heard from a friend about Phoenix, who
had been caught in a barn fire in August. With burns that covered
half of his body, the horse had been taken to a Fayette County
veterinarian. But no one had come to pick him up after his treatment.
"I
arranged to go out and see him," Vallis said.
She adopted
Phoenix.
Tuesday
morning - seven months almost to the day from the September
afternoon when she brought Phoenix home - he grazed in a pasture
at the Bryantsville farm. Vallis stood next to the fence and
talked about continuing recovery schedules and the growth of
new skin around his feet. Phoenix is coming back, she said;
back physically to graze in a pasture and back emotionally to
trust people again.
It's no
coincidence that she named this horse for the mythological bird
that rises from its own ashes. But she isn't wearing blinders
on how long Phoenix's recovery might be either.
"But
I see Phoenix as being (an) inspiration to people," Vallis
said. "His whole personality."
Growing
up in England, Vallis must have learned about the look of a
horse. The lessons came at the end of a broom as she swept out
and cleaned up the barns at her grandfather's farm. The connection
with horses came as she learned at the side of her mother and
father, Rodney and Enid Bower.
And something
must have connected 10 years ago when Vallis saw Zoe - actual
name Truth with Love - in Pennsylvania.
"What
I saw was a horse you could barely touch," she said Tuesday.
"People told me just to ship her away but I said, 'Oh no,
I couldn't do that.'"
Zoe was
taken to Bermuda, the home of Vallis and her husband Francis,
where Vallis worked with her, took time with her, hoped she
might be a riding horse. But Zoe wound up getting sick with
something called anydrosis that causes a potential inability
to sweat.
The odds
were long against getting well. "Most people said there's
not much you can do about it," Vallis said.
"We
worked with her," Vallis recalls about the struggle she
and a veterinarian won over the disease. "We got her sweating."
The fight
to cure her, after the work to train her, must have reminded
Vallis of lessons long since learned on a farm in England. And
this time, the lesson came from Zoe.
Vallis
gives her the credit: "This whole place," she says,
started with the gentle thoroughbred who has come a long way
in a lot of ways from Pennsylvania.
Too well
bred to be a braggart, though, Zoe loped over to the fence Tuesday
morning with Grayfin, a mare set to foal May 15.
Vallis
knows Zoe's spirit: "She was born to race," she said.
Zoe isn't
racing these days but babysitting, being a companion, for Grayfin
and other horses.
At Pine
Knoll Farm, she made the far turn toward home. Thanks to a 45-year-old
native of Shropshire, England who remembered long ago lessons
and didn't look at the odds.
Vallis
and her husband still call Bermuda home, she said and then stopped
to smile. "But this is where my heart is."
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