Chocolate shows us what many of the reactions look like in horses when offering essential oils..
This video shows Chocolate selecting clove oil and taking quite a lot of it. We tend to know clove oil mostly as a means of pain relief for toothache, but it has anti bacterial properties and can be good for digestive problems. I believe she selected it for the latter as she has had some diarrhoea.
She has been getting short bouts of diarrhoea recently when we have frost mornings and then the grass warms up and off she goes munching it. I put her diarrhoea down to her metabolic problems but there could be something else going on as well. Before offering her the clove oil, I offered her wild carrot seed oil which she inhaled some of. Carrot Seed oil is used to stimulate the immune system, cell repair, and liver disorders to name a few. It is an oil I wouldn’t be without.
What I love about this video is that it shows many of the responses to watch for with essential oil offerings. Below is a list of all the responses she shows:
- Nostril flaring ( she has her nostrils very open and flared through most of the session)
- Swallowing
- Stillness
- Heavy blinking / Heavy closing eyelids and head lowering
- Chewing
- A change in breathing; sighing
- Passing frequent droppings (she doesn’t actually pass droppings but she lifts her tail often)
- Chin quivering
- Yawning (she yawns out a release at one point although she does do some more healing and inhalation after that)
- Standing looking vacant (a form of processing)
In addition she shows two other responses which can be mistaken for negative reactions. At the beginning as I offer the clove oil she turns away, but then she comes back to it. Later she actually takes a couple of steps closer to it but I let her choose the distance as it is quite a potent oil. Additionally, you will see some ears back and face pulling briefly at 3 mins 41 seconds in and then again a few seconds later. This is different to the ears back you see at the end as one of the other horses moves.
Can you spot them all?