"Wry" the Long Face?

A horse walks into a bar and the owner says: "Wry the long face?" Back in late July, I was assigned to cover a story with the tagline "The Business of Pets". I wasn't sure what exactly to shoot, my editor just told me that we needed pictures with animals. I thought about heading down to the local animal adoption center but our writer, Hollie Deese, tipped me off on a story developing down at UT's Veterinary School. I called them up. A foal, Barbara, had been brought in by her owners all the way from Texas to undergo a surgery to correct a condition known as 'wry nose' in which a horse's snout is crooked due to malpositioning in the uterus. Visually, the condition is outlandish; kind of like if the horse from Picasso's "Guernica" had been adapted by Dali in his "Persistence of Memory". It causes breathing and nursing problems for foals and most born with severe forms of the condition don't survive. Luckily for Barbara, she is a rare breed; straight Egyptian-Arabian, one important for preservation breeding. So, her owner Martha Carroll-Talley went to the ends of the earth (that is, if you're all the way from down in Dripping-Springs, Texas) to have her snout surgically repaired. A GoFundMe page sprang up from her community to support the operation and Barbara passed by many notable veterinary hospitals on their way to Knoxville in order to reach the most capable surgeon. Few people in the world have the knowledge and capacity to perform this complex operation, James Schumacher, DVM, MS, PhD and Diplomate of the American College of Veterinary Surgeons is one of those people. Having performed the operation 20+ times throughout his career, he is one of the world’s foremost experts. The operation, in which surgeons remove a piece of the horse’s rib cage to correct its nose, took over 12 hours to perform. The operation was an overwhelming success not only saving Barbara's life but also allowing Dr. Schumacher to publish research that could help other veterinarians to help save horses born with wry nose. I caught my first glimpse of Barbara as she was being led back to her stable from the post-op recovery room. Her snout, though straightened, was marred by a line of staples leading from her nostrils to her brow. The thought crossed my mind "I don't think this is the 'cute puppies and kittens' story that my editors were expecting, but damn if this isn't interesting!" A full understanding of the ancient and inexorable ties between humans and animals remains, to this day, unknown. One thing we do know for certain is that we sure do love them.