Whoa! Needham rounds up posse to nab runaway horse
Five cops armed with a banana managed to corral a crafty, pintsized horse who had gotten loose from a Needham barn early yesterday morning in an apparent search for greener pastures.
Four police officers and a state trooper responding to a report of loose animals in the area of Great Plain Avenue and Manning Street arrived shortly after 6 a.m. to find Lucy — a 3-foot-tall, 225-pound American miniature horse — standing in the middle of the road, said Needham police Lt. Chris Baker and David Dirks, Lucy’s owner.
One of the cops managed to lure her in with a banana, said Dirks, who was awoken out of a sound sleep with his wife, Katy, by police at their door.
It turned out that Lucy wasn’t the only one who had managed to abscond. The couple’s other miniature horse, Scotty, had also gotten loose but, shy and less adventurous than his partner in crime, he hadn’t gone beyond their backyard, his owner said.
Lucy, on the other hand, had wandered roughly a quarter-mile from home, where Dirks said he found her wearing a lasso one of the officers had put around her neck.
“The police did a terrific job,” he said. “We were relieved of course that nobody was hurt and the horses were fine.”
Lucy and Scotty are former therapy horses that the Dirkses adopted two years ago from a New Hampshire farm that was closing down.
“They’re very gentle and fun for our kids,” who are ages 9, 11, 13 and 16, Dirks said. “The neighborhood kids like them.”
What remains a bit of a mystery, he said, is exactly how they managed to get out of their stall, which has a gate that has a latch and that opens inward.
Asked whether they had ever escaped before, Dirks said, in the parlance of his furry friends, neigh, neigh.