On her horses’ angel wings

MANILA, Philippines - We always begged for a pet horse when we were children but rather than buy us the skewbald mare that we yearned for, our parents bought us a pet pig instead. 

Only three kids in school owned a horse when we were growing up in Baguio during the late ‘70s. There was Joan Muller with her horse Sparky, Asunta Visperas and her big stallion Cimarron, and Ben Palispis Jr., namesake of his father the Benguet Province governor, who had an entire stable full of beautiful horses all to himself. They rode their horses to school sometimes, while the rest of us collectively held our breath in awe and watched in envy as they kept their seats when their spirited animals reared and pranced. When the three lucky horse owners galloped away on their thoroughbreds, we imagined ourselves on our own steeds, too. But no matter how hard we pleaded, or promised to be careful and clean up after our animals for a change, our parents were steadfast about not giving in. Remaining paranoid after a cousin fell off the saddle, was dragged for a while and fractured her leg, they even took it a step further by forbidding us to go to Wright Park to ride the horses that were rented out there.

To circumvent the rule, my sister Grace took to riding the horses to that then sparsely populated trail called “Marlboro Country” on top of the mountain in Beckel in La Trinidad. Alternatively, she and her friends rode the horses that were set to pasture in the grassy area across the school. They lured the animals with vegetables or sugar so that the horses became very tame and approached them willingly. It was only then when they untied the horses to ride these bareback. Fortunately, they could only do this during lunch break so that the animals had enough time to wind down and recover. Otherwise, the pony boys who left them there to feed might have wondered why their horses were overworked and sweating when they retrieved them in the late afternoons.

I didn’t know it then but there was another kid in school who was a lucky horse owner, too. But Joy Jose-Casusi, one of my sister’s childhood best friends and now one of Baguio City’s popular dermatologist didn’t think she was so lucky then. “My first horse was an emaciated native pony named Chestnut,” she recently shared. Although she loved him, she “was so ashamed of him because the Mullers and the Visperas’ had imported thoroughbreds.“ It was because of this that  she resolved to one day buy a thoroughbred of her own. “So I took up medicine, then dermatology. And when I started earning, I bought horses,” she says.

Starting with ponies for her children, Dr. Joy Casusi moved on to breeding thoroughbreds. She kept her thoroughbred stallions named Uriel and Raphael in Topinao, Tuba in Benguet along with the rest of her family’s dwarf horses.  She also had a mare called Little Star who she cared for dearly. “Little Star suffered from colic and I treated her during the four episodes when she had it. She also survived a miscarriage.” Sadly, however, she was unable to save her mare one last time. “The message came late and I had to travel 17 kilometers to get to her,” Joy recalls. “When I got there she was lying on the ground. I put her head on my lap and saw that she was crying. So I cried with her and prayed to God to take her. She died quickly thereafter.” The experience proved to be so depressing that Joy gave away all her horses.  “I stopped riding for years until this year when I met Gabriel, an ex polo horse and bought him.” She happily relates, “Now my daughter Liana and I are back to riding whenever we have time.”

“Many of my horses are named after angels, did you notice?” says Joy after enumerating a list of names. “When I ride them fast and the wind is on my face, I feel like I, too, have angel’s wings. My horses help me stay young and confident and free.”