SAN DIEGO -- A year ago, Faith San Severino and Adam Smith got the idea to launch Instagram and TikTok pages to promote their Bonsall, California, business, Faithful Friends Mini Horses, which trains and sells miniature horses as therapy animals.
Four months after launching their "@faithfulminis" pages, their videos of small horses playing, undergoing training and making therapy visits to local senior care homes were drawing about 600 viewers a day. Then on May 13, San Severino posted her first video of Peabody, a 3-day-old miniature horse with dwarfism that she and Smith rescued from euthanasia at a Texas horse ranch. The fragile colt was weak and underweight, deaf, couldn't walk on his deformed hooves and was about the size of a housecat.
Suddenly, Faithful Minis video views exploded and the number of page followers eventually ballooned to 1.2 million. People from around the world tuned in daily to follow Peabody as he grew, gained weight, learned to walk on specially designed horseshoes and joyfully clip-clopped around the couple's home, where he lived full time in the den as their "house horse." But last fall, Peabody's liver began to fail and he died on Sept. 14 at just over four months of age.
