But the lessor of the property just outside Alexandra says the man has been offered alternative paddocks and simply refused, and they had gone out of their way to help him.
Lester Cochrane, 70, who is still mining gold and has been a musterer, mostly in the Beaumont and wider West Otago area, is now living in semi-retirement in Clyde.
He owns a Clydesdale named Bonnie, who is almost 30, and a standardbred named Jack, a gelding, who was foaled in 1991.
‘‘The two of them are mates. The two used to live together, and they lived together all their lives until they ended up with different needs.’’
For the past six years he had kept them in a paddock he rents from the Dunstan Equestrian Centre at the old Alexandra racecourse.
He said every year flood irrigation was used to water the paddocks, which always annoyed him.
But it had gone completely over the top this year he said, leading to the water harming Bonnie’s feet.
‘‘This year it was really bad. My horses are standing in water, like three, four inches of water. And it takes 10 days to dry out to be acceptable and by then they start irrigating again.
‘‘Now where we’re at now, they irrigated more intensely just to piss me off.’’
He said he nearly ‘‘blew a gasket’’ when one of the centre’s graziers asked how the horse was, after all the over-irrigating.
‘‘The horse was really beside herself. I haven’t worked for five weeks, and I had five grand put away. I’ve spent all that in rent and vets and everything else. I can’t get away to work because I’ve got to be here for the horse.
‘‘I’m over a barrel. And the horse is just that bad.’’
He said the horse had Cushing’s disease and treatment was available.
‘‘But it is going to cost me $2500 for the next year. I know she is old and that may have something to do with it. And there’s a huge hole under her foot now.
‘‘This is absolutely heartbreaking.’’
He said people in Central Otago were ‘‘irrigation mad’’.
‘‘It doesn’t matter if you’ve had a week’s worth of rain, if it’s the second Tuesday or whatever, and the irrigation is due, and they use it because it’s due. It’s a syndrome.’’
Dunstan Equestrian Centre president Doug Maxwell said he had spent a lot of time with Mr Cochrane and offered him another paddock but he was not interested.
‘‘We try to do as much as we can for the guy,’’ Mr Maxwell said.
He said parts of Mr Cochrane’s paddock was ‘‘dry as a chip’’ and needed to be irrigated.
As far as he was concerned the centre had not done anything wrong.
The way flood irrigation worked, as Mr Cochrane was in the top paddock he got the water first and then it flooded though to the rest of their 10 paddocks. The centre did not make a lot of money from the rental of paddocks and it was a community service.
The paddocks were patchy, he said. He had listened to what Mr Cochrane had to say but did not agree with him.
