Kelsey Allonge woke up early on a Spring day in 2011. She and her mother were on a way to a swap meet in the nearby town of Kankakee, Illinois.

For a reason they can’t quite remember, they decided to take a new route. And that’s where they found a creature in desperate need of their help.

A sight beyond belief

Later, Kelsey told the local news that on the side of the road, they saw a horse lying in a ditch – and things didn’t look good.

“Me and my mom were up to go to a swap-meet at 5:30 in the morning. She just looked like a skeleton. We didn’t think she was going to make it. We just felt so bad for her, just overwhelming sadness.”

No one knows how she got there, but unwanted horses aren’t uncommon in rural Illinois. They think she broke away from her home to find food. Now, it was starving to death.

But Kelsey and her mom weren’t going to let that happen.

Finding a solution

It’s no easy feat to save a horse. And remember, this is 2011, when not everyone had a smartphone to look up the nearest animal rescue to come to their aid.

It would be up to these two women to try and get the horse back to their home until they could figure out what to do.

They managed to get the horse to stand up and determined it could walk, but it wouldn’t fit into their truck. Their home was 9 miles away.

That left one choice – Kelsey would have to walk with the horse all 9 miles.

“I guess just the idea that a life’s a life’ and no matter how small it is, she needed to be saved,” she told her local news.

Time for bonding

It was a 4+ hour journey and there was no guarantee the horse would be able to walk that far as malnourished as she was. But there was no way Kelsey was going to abandon the effort.

“If she was going to die, she wasn’t going to die alone,” she said.

When asked what kept her going during the exhausting trip home, she said it was about saving a life.

“I guess just the idea that a life’s a life and no matter how small it is, she needed saving. My pain wasn’t comparable to what she was in.”

A healing journey

The two made it back to the family’s home where Kelsey and her mom inspected the horse. It had been sorely mistreated and starved before being abandoned. It was just a juvenile – about 6 months old.

Its ribs were visible and it was miserable and uncomfortable.

But the horse did have one thing going for her – a new friend. Kelsey stayed in the barn with the horse she named “Sunny” until the animal was on the mend.

Rewarded for a good deed

Kelsey kept Sunny and the pair became inseparable after she nursed it back to health.

“She’s just like my little baby,” Kelsey told the news.

The 18-year-old was rewarded later that year with the Good Samaritan Award by the American Red Cross of the Heartland. According to the local publication The Pantagraph, it honors” those who unselfishly gave of themselves to save someone’s life or to make the community stronger.”

“Youth award winner Kelsey Allonge of Cropsey rescued a 6-month-old abused horse. The 18-year-old spotted the ailing horse at the side of the road last fall and walked it four hours to the family farm. She slept in a lawn chair near the horse for five nights.”

“She said she didn’t want the horse to die alone,” her mother Cara Filipiak told the publication.

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Source: YouTube – Travis A. Probst, Pantagraph, Boredom Therapy