I was taking the horses home after a performance in Odessa, somehow he got his foot hung in a slat and injured his pastern joint. We took some X-Rays and found that the cartilage has been damaged. I thought that he was ruined and he would have been if we hadn’t had the surgery we eventually had on him.

Kenney said he took Brother to Dr. Watkins at Texas A & M, who told him he had never worked on a bucking horse but that he had done several jumping horses.

I told him if he could do a jumping horse he could do a bucking horse, Dr. Watkins agreed and we went ahead and did surgery on him. They took the cartilage out of the pastern joint and fused that bone together to make one joint. It turns out there’s very little motion in a horses foot there, most of the motion is in the ankle. They put a plate in to hold the bones together where they had fused.They kept him there for 20 days, I brought him home and kept him in a 20X20 pen for another 120 days to keep him from running around. After that we turned him out in the arena and hecame up sound. Dr Watkins told me in April to lay him off for eight months, I decided to just wait and leave him off until Odessa this year.

Brother’s performance has been outstanding since his return.

They split second and third on him in Odessa, he was in the short go in Fort Worth and they were 86 on him there, he finished right behind another one of my horses, Molly. Then I took him to San Antonio and they set the record on him there.I didn’t know that procedure could be done, but I was very pleased that this horse was able to be rehabilitated to the point that he can buck. He doesn’t sore up, he’s not lame, he seems toget better every time he bucks.

Kenney said Brother is now 11 years old. He said the work they did on him was expensive, but in his opinion in was well worth it.

Dr. Watkins said that 85 to 90 % of the horses he worked on he could get back to performing the way they were before the surgery. And most of them were older than Brother. I just knew that he has done a very good job for me, and I was going to do everything I could to save him. If that surgery wasn’t available he wouldn’t have made it.

Now, the way things are going, it looks like Brother’s got a great chance to return to the Wrangler NFR this December.