DVC Dancehall Doc

"Doc" (DVC Dancehall Doc) was rescued from a kill pen in December 2021.  Within a week of his arrival, he became neurological and aggressive if anyone attempted to touch him.  After rescuing him from the shipping truck, we brought Doc back to our farm and during the intake process during the first week we noticed that he was a bit off.  He was highly uncoordinated and he had very strong objections to being touched.  We called the vet in and during the vet exam he became increasingly aggressive, trying to strike and bite anyone who attempted to touch him.  We turned Doc back out into a pasture by himself and decided to wait for the results of the one blood test we were going to be able to run to determine what the cause of the clumsiness was.

For a couple months we blindly treated every ailment that we could think of that would cause either the aggressive behavior or the neurological issues.  During that time, Doc managed to settle in.  We learned his quirks and he learned us.  After a little over a month we decided to try again to put a friend in the pasture with him and he quickly bonded to our resident Standardbred gelding, Shadow.  Having Shadow in the pasture with him seemed to settle him down more so we moved them to a larger pasture.

Over the next six months, we would continue to build trust and try every possible diagnosis and treatment that we could think of that would fix his issues.  We had fallen in love with this horse who at one point in his life tried to kill us all.  We celebrated every small milestone from being lead out of the pasture and into a new pasture to standing for his first full complete veterinary exam.  In July of 2022 we removed the "dangerous horse" designation from him and allowed our volunteers to have more interactions with him.  In August of 2022, we regularly see Doc walking around the farm with different volunteers or following visitors around seeking attention.

Doc was given a second chance with CVHR.  We can only imagine what would have happened to him if he had landed with anyone else.