Believing in Magic

Photo of Magic, taken by the author.

“Lots of bugs this summer! That’s why this horse has runny eyes,” said the local vet I hired to check a bony three-year-old bay gelding before buying him. I sighed with relief. I had already fallen in love with the dull-coated American Quarter Horse who was routinely pushed from the communal feeding trough by stronger horses at the farm where I rode.

The farm owner had saved this horse from pet food fate at an auction, and I offered to train him. The farmer called him “After.” After couldn’t walk a straight line under saddle when I started, but in a few weeks someone became interested in buying him. I convinced my husband that he would be the perfect birthday present for me.

My horse-loving daughter Katie was memorizing the lyrics from the musical Cats at the time, so we renamed him for one of our favorite characters, Magical Mister Mistoffelees. We called my new horse Magic for short. I began training him for low-level horse trials. These involve a dressage test, cross-country jumping (our favorite part!), and stadium jumping.

Under our care, Magic gained over one hundred pounds, and his coat began to gleam. Some of our best memories from the late 1990s involved packing Katie’s horse Paddington and Magic for weekend horse trials in Georgia or South Carolina, where Katie would ride training or preliminary level, and I would happily stick with beginner novice.

Losing Sight

The vet’s diagnosis, however, wasn’t accurate. Magic had equine recurrent uveitis, an autoimmune disease that causes pain and, in about 56% of cases, blindness. Often it affects only one eye, but Magic had it in both.

We carefully treated Magic’s eyes with ointment prescribed for his bouts of inflammation. In his fifth year, my new vet peered into his cloudy blue right eye and told me it had gone blind. I scheduled an appointment at the University of Georgia’s vet school, where I was told I should put him down if the other eye went blind.

Meanwhile, we continued to ride the very steep trails behind our home and at the Georgia Olympic Horse Park, and I began to use voice and hand signals to correspond with terrain. “Up!” I would say with a rising voice as we climbed hills, and “Down!” with a low-pitched voice when descending. I also continued to ride Magic in local and sanctioned dressage shows. Obviously, his jumping days came to a halt to keep both of us safe.

One fall evening during Magic’s sixth year, Katie and I were galloping our horses up a hill when my gentle horse bucked me over his head. Something was wrong. I picked myself up and caught up with him. I swung a hand towards his “good” eye, but he did not react. Magic had gone totally blind.

Competing Blind

So much of this story doesn’t sound real, but it is. Over the next week, I watched in awe as my husband’s horse Zan stood guard over Magic when he would lay down to rest. Sometimes Paddington and Magic would run around the pasture, and Paddy would actually take the outer perimeter, kicking at Magic if he came too near the fence. It was like they knew — they must have known.

After a week, I carted my saddle and bridle out to the pasture, tacked him up and said, “OK. Let’s see what we can do.”

Magic was — magical. The bond of trust we built over the past three years was everything to us. We went on a trail ride as we always had, and I was Magic’s eyes.

Not long after, we were back on the steep hills behind our home, and I began to practice training level and first level dressage tests with him again, entering local shows. People didn’t know Magic was blind until I had his eyes removed by my local veterinarian because it became clear to me that they still caused him pain.

Then I entered a sanctioned show sponsored by the American Horse Show Association (now the US Equestrian Federation). I rode two tests before a judge disqualified us because she finally noticed that my horse had no eyes. Though he did nothing problematic, she considered him to be “dangerous.” I saw horses that were truly dangerous in the warm-up arena; Magic was always calm and quiet.

Back home, I started a petition and got nearly 200 signatures to change the rulebook, clarifying that blind horses should be allowed to compete. It is now a part of DR 119, “Participation in Dressage Competitions” of the USEF Rulebook: “Horses with complete loss of sight in both eyes may only participate in classes in which they are shown individually.” Dressage is an individual competition.

More to Give

After I moved to Florida for my job at the University of South Florida, I boarded Magic at a polo farm, and we used to canter around the track with the polo horses. When the job began to take too much of my time, I convinced the director of the Sarasota-Manatee Association for Riding Therapy (SMART) that he would make a good horse for participants with special needs. Magic began working at the center in 2007, and through his example, he taught children with disabilities as well as military veterans the value of a meaningful life, no matter what challenges they face.

In 2010, Magic was chosen as North American Riding for the Handicapped Association (renamed the Professional Association of Therapeutic Horsemanship International — PATH International) Region 5 Horse of the Year. Around that time, I wrote a children’s book about him called Magic: One SMART Horse. For years, I went out to SMART once a week to ride him and help out. When my professional research duties took me out of the U.S. for months, Magic was retired from riding lessons, but he still helped with student reading groups and military veterans.

I last saw Magic in spring 2021 before going to Paris for a yearlong sabbatical. He was still shiny and gentle, and he recognized me right away, putting his nose against mine, as we breathed each other’s air. Last year, Magical Mister Mistoffolees was put down because he was found to have a cancerous tumor. Magic was 27. He was such a generous soul who brought inspirations to hundreds of people.

To think that all he contributed might have been lost if he had been put down at the age of 6, just because he could no longer see. Magic may have lost his eyesight, but his giant heart more than replaced it.

You can see what a brave and trusting soul Magic was in this video of him on YouTube. He loved to work to music and was 14 at the time we rode this “kur” (a musical freestyle dressage piece) at SMART, a PATH International Premier Accredited Center in Bradenton, FL.