Chester's Busy Week

It's been a busy week indeed for young Haflingers around here. Between lessons, exploring the paddock, bossing us around and tooth care, Chester has had hardly any time to terrorize the Jolly Ball.

He finds his lessons hard because he was told as a very young horse that he must pull things no matter how hard they might resist and the consequences for not doing so were dire. He has done something called logging as a two and three year old and says one must move said logs or suffer verbal abuse and physical assault. It all sounds barbaric to me. Thus, when the humans put him on the spinning rope, he pulls and keeps pulling, retreating into some place where he feels he can't be reached or hurt. They are teaching him to relax and bend his neck when he feels pressure and have finally convinced him that he will not be punished. He was quite hot and sweaty again but seems most pleased with himself. He receives lavish praise for his efforts.

Now that he is nicely settled in his true personality is beginning to show. He is obviously part terrier because he loves to dig and explore with his feet. I have spoken of the delight he takes in stomping on and otherwise abusing the bedding bags. Now, our paddock has been the dumping ground for household discards from the mid-eighteen hundreds until my own humans bought it. After the winter or a heavy rain, many wonderous things make their way to the surface. Shards of very old blue and white pottery, green and blue glass from medicine bottles, bits of crockery and more recently, automotive bits and pieces. The woman does a daily scan for rubbish and whisks it away.

The trees under which this debris surfaces are Chester's favourite playground. Yesterday morning he found a small piece of the dreaded plastic material embedded in a root. He dug and pulled and worked away for hours. When he had finished, there was a large sheet of very old crinkly plastic spread out under the tree. It looked like he was having a picnic. The woman was highly startled when she beheld his handiwork and beetled off to get a shovel to fill in the excavation.

Yesterday afternoon Chester's dental appointment took place. The medical woman arrived with her assistant and they set up a wonderous array of objects on a table. Chester, an innocent in the world of dentistry, was readily caught and led into the barn. He was given a needle, which bothered him not one whit, and quickly grew quite inebriated. His first dental tune-up revealed many points on his teeth, a tiny, deformed wolf tooth, which was extracted, and a canine tooth so sharp it had cut his tongue. Canine tooth? I have felt from the beginning he was part Golden Retriever (in addition to the terrier blood) and this would seem to prove my theory.

I stayed well away from the proceedings but Molly kept sticking her head in the barn, checking to see he wasn't getting treats. He wasn't. He was helped to his stall and told he had to stay there for two hours. Within a few minutes we could hear pitiful wailing and crying coming from within - no gnashing of teeth though, thank goodness.

He was back to his usual self in no time, running around the paddock in straight lines and generally making a nuisance of himself. Who know what he'll dig up next or what creative pastime he'll invent for his newly perfect teeth.