Consider if you will a horse. Long horse legs, a horse body. And on top? A horse head. He is as beautiful as he is majestic. Nothing to see here, you’re thinking. Just a horse. Perhaps. For a brief moment recently in a South Carolina town, this elegant creature was in a hayloft, way up above a barn. And he got there by himself!
Or did he?
According to an AP report, Horry County Fire Rescue workers were called to that hayloft in Loris, South Carolina, to help remove our horse friend, who had managed to both escape his stall and climb into the hayloft. Veterinarians were called to the scene to sedate the horse, allowing him to be lowered to the ground on a platform. (He is okay now.) “Rescue workers,” says the AP, “still haven’t figured out how the horse managed to climb a narrow set of stairs into the loft.”
I suppose that is our job.
1. Aliens?
My first thought was, of course, that aliens lifted the horse into the loft as some sort of “funny” joke. I reached out to the Cut’s alien expert Katie Heaney and asked if she thought maybe it was aliens. “Well, yes, we are all well aware that sometimes aliens suck the blood from cows,” she said, “so I don’t see why they couldn’t also put a horse in an attic for reasons of their own.” Just as I suspected, although it does make me nervous for the horse.
2. Horse Had Been Practicing
We don’t know that this was the horse’s first attempt at entering the hayloft, we just know that it was his first successful one. Perhaps there were many other failed attempts, which could explain why he was seemingly so effortlessly good at climbing the narrow ladder. He’d been practicing.
3. Just Naturally Good at Climbing
Though I suppose the other option is that he was just born good at it.
Well. I guess all we can say for sure is that there is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of horses.