Animals, too, pay the ultimate price

Veterinarian Matt Matthews delivered the news with a solemn shake of his head.

“I can’t fix it,” he told Glenda Parcell after examining her horse’s right leg. “He’ll bleed to death.”

Tater, a 4-year-old gelding, had fallen in his trailer in the middle of the night Tuesday as Parcell and her husband fled the flames closing in on the La Jolla Indian Reservation in San Diego County.

They slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting a Volkswagen that had stopped without warning ahead of them on the only road out.

Tater went tumbling.

Matthews, summoned by the couple to the parking lot of the Pala Casino Spa & Resort about 7 a.m., determined quickly that Tater had broken his left femur.

Reluctantly, Matthews filled a syringe with a combination of two narcotics, Torbugesic and xylazine, and slipped the needle into the horse’s jugular vein so he wouldn’t feel the pain to come. The horse, who had managed to get back to its feet, took the injection without complaint.

“He’s being a gentleman,” Parcell told the veterinarian.

Parcell, who has ridden and trained horses since she was a child, gave Tater his name because he had “a Mr. Potato Head” personality. He was a particularly sweet horse, she said.

She couldn’t imagine leaving him behind.

Matthews came out of the trailer and closed the door behind him, as if trying to mute the sounds that followed: Tater, knocked unconscious, banged into one wall, then the next, before collapsing to the floor with a final thud.

Then silence, broken only by Parcell’s uncontrollable sobs.

As her husband and other relatives embraced and consoled her, Matthews finished the task -- his fourth horse euthanasia in 24 hours -- with a needle full of pentobarbital.

In the minutes it took to slow Tater’s heart to a stop, Parcell climbed inside the trailer, knelt by his side, stroked his mane and whispered a tearful goodbye.