A horse is a little muddy, but apparently uninjured after falling into a ditch in Abbotsford on Saturday.

Dozens of firefighters and police officers gathered on a rural road shortly after noon to pull the animal from the ditch using a hose line and a tractor from a nearby farm.

Abbotsford assistant fire chief Ron Hull praised his crews’ efforts to retrieve the horse.

“It’s always a little tricky with animals because you want to make sure not to hurt them or to make anything worse,” he said. “The crews were careful to work with the owners of the horses and get them out safe.”

Carol Champion and a friend were riding their horses together when the incident occurred. It was her friend’s horse who ended up in the ditch.

“We were paused here on the road on our trail ride and the horse spooked at something and just backed up into the ditch,” Champion said. “There’s just no shoulder here. It was kind of slow-motion train wreck.”

The horse quickly got stuck up to her waist in mud and was unable to get enough of a foothold to walk out of the ditch, Champion said.

After crews freed the horse, she was up and walking in seconds. Champion said the riders will wash of the horse and check her out, but it seems that she wasn’t injured at all.

“The emergency response workers, they really seemed to know what they were doing,” she said. “They were just really calm and problem-solving, and I felt like as soon as they got here we figured we’d probably have a good outcome.”