15 April 2008

Over the past week, we’ve been doing very little with Charlot. Saying hello, trying to teach him to lead nicely but mostly letting him relax and graze with the herd.

Charlot is leading better and will walk alongside but he doesn’t like enclosed gaps, like a small gateway. Funnily enough, he had a complete hissy fit at going through a gateway and then walked calmly over our building site, drains and all, without blinking, just following me calmly.

He is nervous about us touching his legs. Back ones are still an issue but he will pick them up eventually and the kicking is getting less. Pony nuts are ok, but when something stressful is happening (in his head), then no amount of bribery will work. You can almost see the thought processes at work. He just has to decide to do it and trust us. In a way this must be better, because Charlot’s compliance to different situations will be based on trust rather than food. Edward, of course, is always there to help, offer advice and generally get in the way.

I had a reading done for Charlot by animal communicator Linda Desoer-Forster from Animal Communicare. Here are some extracts:-

“What a wonderful charming young man Charlot is. He comes across as being very sweet natured and very genuine, but very bewildered by everything that has happened to him of late......Charlot firstly wants to point out that he gets confused with words, much of what he hears he doesn’t understand, but he can understand the emotions and thoughts behind them......In his few years of life Charlot shows he has become a very well travelled young man, it feels like he his showing that his life didn’t start in the same place in France that he ultimately came from, cannot be sure it was even France, as a very young horse he was sold at market and moved across the country......On the whole Charlot has a bit of a dim view of humans, in his past life all the humans he has come in to contact with have been hard and aggressive, handling him and others like him like inanimate objects rather than something that has a heart and a soul, its only recently that he is starting to understand that humans can have a milder streak. This sometimes makes him slightly anxious, is something bad going to happen? Can he trust people?.....Charlot, whilst it is obvious he is only a young man, is so worldly wise in many ways, almost like a child who has grown up on the streets or in a war torn country.”