You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink, goes the old saying.
That is certainly the case if the horse in question is a statue.
North Yorkshire firefighters made a horse mistake when they were called to a flood in North Road, Ripon, on the morning of 11 January.
A concerned bystander had seen a horse stranded in the high water.
They had sounded the alarm when a firefighter arrived on the scene.
He soon learned that the horse in question was a statue – made to commemorate the First World War.
The fire service was then called off.
The North Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service issued a statement about the unusual call saying: ‘An officer attended to a report of a horse seen in floodwaters.
“This turned out to be a false alarm, the horse seen was actually a statue surrounded by floodwaters.
“No action from the fire department was needed.”
A similar misidentified animal caused momentary chaos in Oldham, Manchester, last year.
A concerned resident said he saw a ‘tiger’ in the garden of a house in the city.
Officers rushed to the scene to find very terrifying – it was just a stuffed animal.
Three armed conservationists rushed to the village of Kinyana to trap the creature.
They found nothing but a tote bag with an image of a lion’s head and found it had been placed in the bushes by a nearby homeowner.
She had avocado tree seedlings in the bag and didn’t want them to dry out in the sun, so she placed them between the thick hedge branches.
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