Neglected Pony Nears His Happy Ending

He is virtually blind now, and hard of hearing. His coat, normally shaggy in winter anyway, has grown perennially rough from age. He’s also temperamental and prone to sudden kicks.

But people still remember King, their memories burned with a picture of the Shetland pony with his stomach bloated from malnutrition and his diseased hoofs curled 16 inches upward, like an elf’s shoes.

That was how he looked when he was found 14 years ago in a nailed-shut barn, nearly buried in his own waste.

The discovery attracted attention around the world, recalls Peter Saunders, the agent for the New Hampshire Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, who found the diminutive pony.

Saunders still receives an occasional letter from someone who remembers King’s sad state, and the pony has had a handful of visitors almost daily since returning for good to the SPCA’s farm in September.

“It still fascinates me there is so much interest in this one little animal,” Saunders says.

Saunders learned of King one summer day in 1977 while investigating a stable in Plaistow. Some children were tagging along, and one told him, “You should see the animal on the other side of town.”

No one was at the house when Saunders arrived, but the barn, a renovated garage, was nearby with a window in plain view. He looked in.

Peering from the gloom was a waist-tall chestnut pony surrounded by manure piled as high as his head. He was alone in his 10-by-10-foot stall except for “flies and other creepy-crawlies.”

He had been shut in there, the SPCA estimates, at least four years.

King was far from alone a couple of weeks later when about 200 people watched as handlers carefully trimmed about 20 pounds of excess hoof, caused by a disease called laminitis. It took about four hours, recalls Carolyn Farrington, the SPCA’s large animal manager.

“They let him go and he just flew around,” she remembers. “His hoofs were literally flying.”

Despite his horrifying appearance, lameness and malnutrition, King was basically sound, Farrington says. He was kept a month or so at the University of New Hampshire until he reached full health.

Then he returned to the SPCA to be adopted by the first of what became four families over the years. The last family, preparing to move out of the state, returned him this fall to the shelter, where the 24-year-old pony will stay until he dies.

“He wasn’t unhealthy, but he’s getting to a point where the management should be done by us,” Farrington says. “He’s not an easy pony to handle, really. He always had a kind of a stubborn streak.”

It could have been King’s temperament that got him in trouble, she theorizes.

“Unknowingly, people buy a pony like that for their family, their children,” she says. “It becomes something they have a hard time handling. They resent that. Resentment turns to neglect, neglect to abuse.”

The publicity about King’s plight created a furious backlash against the woman who owned the pony. She received a torrent of hate mail, Saunders says.

Eventually, charges against her were dropped. “She was punished more by the media than the courts could do with her,” Saunders says. “The cause of justice was served by the attention that was generated.”

That attention lingers.

“Every once in a while I get a yellowed, dogeared clipping that has obviously been tacked to the wall or been on the refrigerator,” Saunders says. “They mail it to me and say, ‘Whatever happened to this pony?”’

The answer stands in a snowy pasture next to the society’s large shelter. There, King munches hay and roams in and out of a spacious stall in a barn shared with three other horses.

He has made friends with another boarder, a Welsh pony named Wyvrin who acts as a kind of guardian, standing patiently as King gives him an affectionate chomp on the neck.

King’s celebrity also has helped his rescuers. They have set up a trust fund for his care and put his picture on SPCA Christmas cards.