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**********Disclaimer***This Is A Farm Post***This Post Deals With Death…(again)**********

This is one of those posts I didn’t want to write…..

Brave died on Saturday…..

It was sudden…and yet…it wasn’t…..

His appetite had waned over the last year or so…and we didn’t know why…..

We thought maybe he was depressed after Claire’s death…..

…..but he had Pepper for company since December(?)…..

We were treating him for ulcers with aloe vera gel and probiotics…they seemed to work…and then they didn’t…and then they seemed to work again…and then they didn’t…..

My older daughter started soaking beet pulp for him to help his hind gut digestion…..

He seemed to like that…or maybe it was the company that he liked…because she’d sit with him and hold the pan while he was eating…..

…..(I think he enjoyed slobbering on her most of all)…..

We changed his hay from the big compressed alfalfa bales…to the leafier square bales…..

The flakes were easier to eat…and he seemed to like that…..

We added corn oil to his ProForce Fuel feed for added calories…..

…..some days he would eat it…and others he would just play with it…..

He had developed a squamous cell carcinoma on his lower left eyelid…we were planning to have that removed next month…..

Our vet didn’t think it was a systemic cancer…..

…but rather something topical that could be removed…(his mother Christina had had one too(?)…..

But Brave’s actual death on Saturday afternoon was sudden and dramatic…..

Earlier that day…my daughters and I had sat with Brave while he ate his beet pulp and regular breakfast…everything seemed normal…..

That afternoon…I was actually sitting in the front yard visiting with Doctor Brigid…and Brave was napping in his pasture under the trees…..

But later…suddenly Brave ran towards the fence…and abruptly collapsed…..

When we got to him…he died within minutes…..

Doctor Brigid said it was most probably a stroke to have happened that quickly…..

…..later my older daughter said that she was watching him from the porch just prior to his collapse…and that he had started walking in circles(?)…..

…..I had missed that…..

Whatever was the ultimate cause of Brave’s passing………….it was very fast…..

Brave would have been seventeen this coming June…..