Charlie is a roamer

Press, 24 May 1980, Page 15

Charlie is a roamer

Country Diary by

Derrick Rooney

We have an addition to the family. Charlie has arrived. Charlie is 16 years old, and as shaggy as a woolly bear. He is 12.2 hands, quiet, gentle; the perfect child’s pony. He is also a problem horse. Charlie was bred in the hills, and although he has not been there for the last nine years or so of his life he likes to break out occasionally and head for home. Charlie also likes company. For all his 16 years Charlie has lived with other horses, and if he has anvthing to do with it he will not change his ways now. His appearance is deceptive; he is as thick and ponderous-looking as Cookie Bear, but he can jump like a mountain goat (there is a bit of Welsh mountain pony in his background), and an ordinary gate or fence is a mere skip to him. When we brought Charlie home we put a pony owned by a neighbour in the paddock with him, and this was fine; the two got on famously, until the dread day when the other pony went off to the sales, and didn’t come back. When the other pony was led out of the paddock Charlie went out, too, and he was quarter of a mile down the road before someone caught him. Charlie spent the next two days tethered to a tree in our garden, and the next two nights shut in ' a cattle yard (he couldn’t jump out of there), while we thought about the problem. A friend, in what must be the noble gesture of the year, offered, on loan, a companion for him — a superb half-Arab filly .that is two years old, and not yet being ridden. Would she stay by herself when our daughter took Charlie out for a ride? Surely, he said. She doesn’t jump. But two days later, when Charlie was taken out for his ride, the filly came, too, over the fence. We couldn’t have that. We couldn’t risk leting her roam the road, to injure herself or be hit by a vehicle; so. home she went.. That night, and every night ' since, Charlie has been tethered on a long rope to a big metal stake that I drove into the ground. It is not a happy situation, at least not for us; Charlie doesn’t seem to mind, yet. While the school holi•days last he is spending ihis night tethered in ’the paddock, his mornings tied up under 'the willow tree at the

bottom of our garden, 'where he is doing a useful service by chomping up the rough grass that our mower will hot go through, and his afternoons being ridden. Sooner or later we will have to do something about the situation, but what? I doubt if Charlie will change his ways and our two pet lambs don’t seem to be providing very challenging company for him.

We don’t have the financial resources to surround the paddock withdeer netting, which is about the only thing that will keep Charlie in. We can’t afford an electric fence, either. So for the foreseeable future it looks as though Charlie is going to his spend his nights going in circles. Eventually he will come to the end of his tether, but before he does perhaps a solution will present itself.

From the Animal Health Laboratory at Lincoln comes a sequel to an article thaf I wrote in Dea cember about hares, and a “mystery sickness” that was affecting a percentage of the wild population. Mr R. C. Gumbrell, of the laboratory staff, writes that one Friday night two hunters brought to him a “sick” hare that one of them had shot. It was a lactating doe, and when he examined it he found two leverets in utero. •He writes:

“Her fur was coming out, a sign of ‘nutritional stress’ (i.e. too great a drain of energy from the milk production and leveret ‘growth for the available energy input from her food). We found 5000 Trichstrongylus worms in her intestines — these are similar to the worms which cause problems in sheep and cattle; the type found in the hare are specific to hares. The worms would be a big drain on her. Without them I imagine she would have been able to manage pregnancy with lactation and continue to grow her fur.”

So the “mystery disease” is no mystery after all, just something that a shot of drench would fix in a flash. J