It was a stressful and messy morning for Shaughnessy, a 27-year-old horse from the Kelowna area.
The horse was stuck in a muddy drainage ditch for up to ten hours. Her owners dug the ditch to deal with excess water runoff from recent flooding and believe Shaughnessy fell into it sometime Tuesday night.
The Ellison volunteer fire department came to the rescue Wednesday morning.
“Fortunately the owner had a tractor and a couple of straps,” Ellison fire department safety officer Darrell Belgrove said.
“After about an hour worth of digging, we finally got the horse.”
Shaughnessy was breathing pretty hard, her heart was racing and she sustained a gash on her leg, but didn’t suffer any major injuries.
This is the volunteer fire department’s first horse rescue.
“Usually it’s people who fall off horses. This time it was the horse itself,” Belgrove said.