When David Stokely arrived at his family’s 40-acre farm near Battlefield, Mo., on the evening of March 12, the first thing he spotted was a dead horse, a victim of the second tornado that has hit Stokely Farms in less than three years. It appeared the horse had run into a heavy fence corner post and died immediately from his injuries.

“Of course you always assume the worst when you see something like that,” Stokely said. “We saw live horses milling about in the darkness, and we had no idea how many were dead or how many were horribly injured.”

This horse was the only casualty, compared to three horses that were killed in the May 2003 tornado. “Two (live) horses were trapped under walls,” he said of the 2006 tornado. “One was under a wall of jagged nails, and we thought we would be unable to get him out without getting someone else hurt. There was so much blood that I thought this horse had been literally eviscerated. We lifted the wall partially off of him (with a front-end loader), and it appeared he had exhausted himself in the struggle.”

Stokely went to retrieve emergency supplies and a loaded pistol to euthanatize the horse. In the meantime, “I’d gotten distracted in all the chaos and confusion, and when I got back, this horse had literally had saved up his strength and made some kind of Herculean effort to get himself out from underneath that wall,” said Stokely. “We thought he was gone, and he was moments away from euthanasia. Luckily, God distracted me from doing that