The Horse Herbalist

Trust Your Instincts: Chanel’s Story

Horses are emotional beings, just like us, and carry stress and trauma with them.  This is the story of mother and daughter show jumping team Anita and Alison Ostenfeld, and their beautiful 2 ½ year old filly, Chanel.

When they brought her home for the first time it was clear she hadn’t been handled much, but Anita and Alison worked on gaining her trust through groundwork and gentle handling.

Then they found Chanel had run through an electric fence – no physical injuries, thank goodness, so all seemed well.

A week later, Alison found Chanel away from her paddock mate seemingly frozen in a corner of paddock.  She’d clearly been there most of the day, and hardly moved.

Another incident occurred where Chanel caught her tail in the electric fencing, panicked, and ran off into the distance, going through the fence again.  Luckily they found her – but she was “frozen” in a the corner of a neighbour’s field.  Again, no physical injuries were found.

They moved Chanel to a one-acre plain wire paddock where she either stood in the corner or galloped flat out to the next corner. Until Anita and Alison moved the trough to ‘her’ corner they had to lead her to the water trough so she would drink!  Her feed trough was about halfway down the fence line, so she’d bolt to the feed, grab a few bites whilst pawing the ground then bolt back to a corner, her heart racing and looking petrified. She was happy for Anita or Alison to approach and handle her. The ladies, particularly Alison, were Chanel’s safe spot.

(Play the video below to see for yourself some of her behaviour before treatment, and the progress she is showing so far.)

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9kgO2T_j6w[/embedyt]

It was heartbreaking for the two ladies to watch, and they were at their wits’ end when they contacted me for help.  They took a hair sample, sent it in, and I did a thorough Hair Assessment to find out what was going on.  I discovered that while Chanels’ adrenal glands and liver were compromised because of the 3 months of self imposed terror, Chanel’s autonomic nervous system had been out of balance for over 18 months.

So the root cause of Chanel’s imbalances had started before Alison and Anita purchased her (and who knows what had happened to her?) but symptomatically nothing had shown except young horse nerves.

Then her first run in with the electric fence gave her another almighty scare quickly followed by the fence seemingly biting her again – all compounding her Autonomic Nervous System imbalance – her flight trigger out of her control.

Mentally/emotionally she was full of fear and doubted herself which made her feel gloomy and unconfident.  The poor thing was in a state! I made an individually tailored herbal and flower remedy solution for Chanel to start the healing process.

Soon after, Alison and Anita sent this feedback to me:

“Chanel is doing REALLY well.  Within days of starting the treatments she was behaving almost like a normal horse – even more normal than before her fright with the electric fence.

She has stopped racing to and standing in the corner of the paddock completely.  She happily grazes anywhere in the paddock and walks up to greet us.  She looks happy and relaxed all the time and only bucks and bolts around with excitement (not terror).  She has even stopped pawing at her feed trough while eating and has long sleeps sitting down everyday.  We have even noticed her lying out flat!”

Thank goodness this lovely mare had such compassionate owners to look out for her.

Chanel is almost at the end of our 15 week treatment program, and continues to improve.  When we retested her halfway through, it was clear to me that her mental/emotional balance had improved enormously. No longer was she holding onto all that fear. She indicated that she loved her environment, her humans, ridden work and free jumping.  These are super shifts in such a short space of time!

Find out more about how Angela can help clicking here.