I wrote a new article and i wanted to share it with everyone. I hope you enjoy it!
My pet is a horse called Dollar. Most people would say that a horse is a very unusual pet and would not make a good pet at all .But, they are wrong. Well , not fully wrong, but partly wrong and partly correct. Because, a horse is an unusual pet, but it is an unusual pet for someone who doesn’t ride horses. But, for a rider, it is a very common pet, as most accomplished polo and dressage riders have their own horses, as they use them quite a lot. Polo horses are ridden quite often. It is true that a round in a polo match called a “chakka” lasts only seven and a half minutes, but in those seven and a half minutes, the horses do as much work as they would have done for seven and a half hours [ Okay not seven and a half hours, I was just kidding. But they sure do work hard!] . Dressage is another type of equinine sport where the horse has to be ridden in a very precise manner. Training your horse for dressage makes the horse work har too!
Therefore horses which compete in sports have to be very well fed and kept with great care. And if they have a slight injury such as a slight limp in the front leg, they will no longer be fit for competitions. So, they are bought by riding schools and they are then used to teach people riding. Okay, it’s not sad. But don’t go straight to the animal rights officer and complain that they are not kept as properly as they were at the polo stables at the ones they are sent to! They are much more well kept and fed by the children who come there!! They always give the horses carrots and are good with them. This is what happened to dollar. Anyway enough about polo and its horses, we must talk about dollar, whom this is about.
Dollar is a bay [ bay is a dark brown, almost black color], and has a white star on his forehead and one white sock. He was a polo horse until he came to Red Earth, the place where he lives now. I was very excited when I heard that he was arriving from Bangalore, as he had come from Jaipur to Mumbai, from Mumbai to Bangalore, and then he came here. His transportation took almost a month. He is now being trained , as the rules of polo are different from the dressage rules.
Dollar is a very tall horse, in fact he is one of the tallest horses in Red Earth. He is a very gentle and quiet horse, and he loves eating carrots. I always give him carrots when I visit him. Sometimes he turns his head and stands in his stall, trying to poke his nose into the next horses’ stall. When he does this and I want to feed him carrots, I call his name and tap on the stall door. He always turns around and pokes his head out and looks at me as if he is saying: “ hey! I thought you got carrots for me! ” and sniffs me to see if I have his carrots. When he smells them, he lowers his head to my height,[ I can’t reach and give him carrots if he doesn’t lower his head, he’s too tall] and I make my hand flat and balance the carrot on my hand [ balancing is necessary or else it will fall on the sandy ground below, and horses don’t like eating sandy carrots and if I hold it with my fingers he might mistake my finger for the carrot and chomp them up], and he eats it.
He also has a long tail which he swishes to keep away flies, but when someone is grooming him [me, for instance ], he thinks the brush is a fly and swishes his tail, and it hits the person’s face [and his tail can hurt!]. That is why we must always wear a helmet, even while brushing a horse. Some horses kick too, but luckily Dollar doesn’t. That’s why I never go behind a horse so he can’t kick you as horses mostly kick only with back legs, because they can’t see who’s behind them. Dollar is too high for me to reach all the way up and groom him on his back, so the stable hands do that.
Dollar is a very tall horse, in fact he is one of the tallest horses in Red Earth. He is a very gentle and quiet horse, and he loves eating carrots. I always give him carrots when I visit him. Sometimes he turns his head and stands in his stall, trying to poke his nose into the next horses’ stall. When he does this and I want to feed him carrots, I call his name and tap on the stall door. He always turns around and pokes his head out and looks at me as if he is saying: “ hey! I thought you got carrots for me! ” and sniffs me to see if I have his carrots. When he smells them, he lowers his head to my height,[ I can’t reach and give him carrots if he doesn’t lower his head, he’s too tall] and I make my hand flat and balance the carrot on my hand [ balancing is necessary or else it will fall on the sandy ground below, and horses don’t like eating sandy carrots and if I hold it with my fingers he might mistake my finger for the carrot and chomp them up], and he eats it.
He also has a long tail which he swishes to keep away flies, but when someone is grooming him [me, for instance ], he thinks the brush is a fly and swishes his tail, and it hits the person’s face [and his tail can hurt!]. That is why we must always wear a helmet, even while brushing a horse. Some horses kick too, but luckily Dollar doesn’t. That’s why I never go behind a horse so he can’t kick you as horses mostly kick only with back legs, because they can’t see who’s behind them. Dollar is too high for me to reach all the way up and groom him on his back, so the stable hands do that.
He is ridden everyday by the stable hands, and is fed well, too.[ he gets a lot of hay, and I give him a lot of carrots, all the horses around him look into his stall jealously while I give Dollar carrots, as they are not given carrots very often.] I also give some carrots to the pony I ride, but luckily Dollar is too far away from the pony too see, because he might be angry with me for giving carrots to another horse!, I also give carrots to the baby horse next to dollar and also to a horse called Magic but they are Dollar’s friends, so Dollar doesn’t mind. Dollar is a wonderful horse and he is the best pet I could have.
Devanshika Bajpai
