There are things that the animal communicator told me about Holly that still bring a smile to my face, like how she enjoys a stall that is open and airy, or how she likes the smell of fresh pine shavings or feeling the warmth of sunlight.
She likes green apples too, and carrots, although she wasn’t used to such treats. Such things perplex her – she’d gotten the basics before but not the treats.
It was over six years ago when I called an animal communicator to try to gain some insight into Holly’s view on life, trying to decide whether or not to buy her.
I first saw Holly – Miss Hollywood - in a ‘for sale’ photo on the Internet. My first thought was, in my dreams… I kept scrolling. About three weeks later I got a call from her owner: “I hear you’re looking for a horse? We have one for sale.” As it turns out, things weren’t working out with the mare and they wondered if I’d like to try her out. I could take all the time I wanted to decide – the leggy 16 hand tall bay and white Paint beauty was on lease at the moment and another lease arrangement would be fine too. Whatever worked was fine.
Smitten by her beauty, I couldn’t resist the temptation. She had been having lameness issues with continuous abscesses in her feet. She was sound enough to ride but kicked out if you asked her to canter. I just figured that I didn’t ride well enough for her tastes, and I was right there, but that was another issue.
We went to pick her up and the barn manager says, “Oh, by the way, I can’t turn her out with the other horses because the boarders are scared to go into a field with her to get their horses.” Really? Apparently, she hadn’t been the easiest mare to handle or be around. “Does she load okay,” I asked? She did, and we headed home.
Since she was a show horse I figured I should show her. Two weeks after she came to us I was bathing Princess Holly and her Majesty seemed to be enjoying it. Until I got to her tail, then she had a flashback and snapped a new cedar fence post in half, taking a couple of sections of fence with it.
“She has an injured tail,” imparted the animal communicator. As Holly told the story, she had caught her tail in a heavy wood stall door but no one noticed. “She’s dealt with this for a long time, maybe three years?”
The way the horse ‘tells’ the communicator about a physical issue is by inducing a reaction in her body at the point where the horse feels the pain, but in this case, humans have no tail so it was just a guess that the injury was about a hand’s width away from the base of the tail.
The next day the vet came out to do the pre-purchase exam. The comment on the report was that her tail had a “corkscrew appearance”. I had made no mention of the bathing incident or the animal communicator’s comments to the vet.
Holly did have a hard time lifting her beautiful, thick black tail, and if the communicator was correct, the pain she felt with every step was what made her tense up along the entire right side of her body. She had a continual headache, a dull pain that affected her attitude and made her want to bite. “Sorry for biting,” she imparted to the communicator. Holly was embarrassed to admit it, but she got angry sometimes. “I don’t mean to,” the mare told the communicator, talking in a soft little voice, hanging her head in shame. “I’ll try not to do it again.”
From her home in Oregon, over the phone, never having met either the mare or myself or even having seen a photo, the animal communicator painted a picture of a horse that acted like a child who had spent her life in foster homes, a little girl with pigtails, standing in a corner, waiting for someone to adopt her that would appreciate her for more than just her physical beauty. She was difficult, to say the least.
I hung up the phone and went to the barn to find Holly standing with her head in the corner of the shed, that little girl, waiting for me to decide.