And so Chandra was sleeping, I was drinking tea and it was two hours until the pickup truck was due to collect us. Then a mare trots down the road and wakes up poor Chandra with her calls. I asked the locals to stop her from entering the enclosure through the gap in the picture above while I tried to calm poor old Chandra down. Despite never having covered a mare, he has a very good idea of what it's all about and as he is now sexually mature the frustration can get the better of the poor guy.
Then to my horror, rather than chase the mare away, the villagers actively herded her in towards my stallion! I went to shoo her and she turned round and aimed a kick at my head that gracefully missed. She was in heat, and one of those mare who is aggressive when in heat, so she was trying to get to Chandra, or to attack me if I got in the way, I was screaming for help, someone to bring a stick, anything, find the owner and the villagers all stood round, blocking the exit and staring on the scene as immobile as statues oblivious to my increasingly panicked requests for help. Chandra was on the verge of mounting the homicidal mare when I managed to find a wooden post to chase her off with, but still the villagers blocked the exit, refused to catch her and made the situation much worse that it would have been out in the open (I managed to ride past loose mares without too much incident twice on the road). Then the mare started lunging at me again so, I'm not proud but I picked up the closest thing to hand, a chair and threw it at her. That and the huge heavy wooden post managed to get her away from Chandra and I got her through the villagers and away from my horse. Then the villagers started telling me to chill out, what's the problem, oh we can't help because we're all afraid of horses, it's not the owners fault that the rope broke. Interestingly an hour after he sees that there is a valuable purebred, tall Marwari stallion in the village his mare breaks her rope...and there was no trace of broken rope on her...A mating with Chandra would cost R5000, his mare is short and mixed so he would make a pretty penny off of the offspring of my stallion. Besides I'm only a woman, what would a woman do? A woman and a horse, pah, so goes the village logic. If I were a man no such thing would happen.
Poor Chandra was very frustrated by the whole fiasco and I got my things together, tacked up and rode off in record time despite my fever, abscess and pain and we rode back to Bur, 6kms away with me hyperventilating half the way from the shock and stress of it all. I was lucky, mostly stallions who are sexually frustrated like that will bite or rear and box with their front hooves to assert their dominance and frustration over the situation. I am lucky enough to own one of the few stallions that can be ridden away without trouble after such an event.
This event did have a lasting effect on Chandra's behaviour though; he rears more, and is much more sexually frustrated than before. Meaning that it was impossible to ride him in the Pushkar grounds, as soon as he saw all those mares he reared and reared. Not in an aggressive way, it's a natural thing, stallions showing off to mares. I'd rather his introduction to the world of mating to be better though. My friend Rafeek is a horse training near Ajmer, he has three stallions that understand when mating behaviour is appropriate and when it's not. I'm debating sending Chandra to him for mating training when I have money. If he starts with good habits then it is much kinder than letting him get bad habits and then trying to correct them.
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