by Victoria H.

Created on: June 16, 2008

Horse and I. I am, I think, in the rare position of having a pet who is the embodiment of my spirit animal. Horse is not the only totem I have, but he is in ascendancy. The following description of what the horse symbolizes comes from the site http://onespiritx.tripod.com/magick18.htm: Horse- The Goddess, the Land, Travel, Power, Freedom, Strength, Movement, Grace, Dignity, Stamina, Endurance, Faithfulness, Journey, Swiftness, Friends, Loyalty, Astral Traveling. It is not just that William, or Will or Billy Boy as I frequently refer to him, is a horse, or even that he is my horse, but rather that he is my destined companion.

I first met William when I took a position as a research assistant in an equine nutrition study at the University of Maryland, in my final semester before earning my BA. I am drawn to animals with neuroses, and so initially it was another horse who caught my attention. Carson was a weaver with an emotional dependency on his neighbor, Ought Not. I wanted to be a comfort to this notably crazy horse, in a barn full of Thoroughbred horses (the hot-blooded breed that runs the famous Triple Crown) made crazy by too much food and too little exercise. I am thankful that William was smarter than I. My first shift was on a Wednesday morning, the day the horses were brought to the scale to be weighed. The doctoral student, Rachel, who was leading the study warned me that William was difficult to weigh, because the sound of his feet on the concrete of the treatment room and the metal of the scale seemed to scare him. He followed me and stepped on the scale, then allowed me to turn him around and reposition him on the scale to double check the numbers, all with nary a problem. Rachel declared that I would be responsible for weighing William for the duration of the study. My parents suggested that since I had never performed any blood tests, poop grabs, or ultrasounds on William, he had no reason to mistrust my intentions when I took him into the treatment room. But I know that he chose me, so I had no choice but to love him; I have always been desperate for approval. When I left at the conclusion of the study, I made sure to mention that if they ever decided to retire William from research, I would take him, thinking there was a greater possibility of his being rehomed than Carson, who was one of the calmest geldings in the herd.

A year later, the university had no research studies and decided to disperse the herd. I noticed that a colleague of mine had

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