Meet Pandora: The horse that has it worse than a porn star with a condom allergy

(Pandora: The horse with a Tom Jones allergy…)

So, you have female spiders who eat their mates after sex. There are wasps that lay their eggs in the bodies of caterpillars and small critters in tropical rivers that follow the stream back to the source when you take a piss in their habitat.

Plus, of course, a few billion humans who make life a living Hell for most of the other species on space ship Earth.

In other words, there are enough hard luck stories going around to satisfy the most misanthropic Country & Western singer ever to have his heart, guitar strings and dear old mother’s dentures broken in Nashville.

Still, some stories will always stand out.

Who wouldn’t feel for a politician who’d be allergic to lying, a celebrity who’d get unseemly flushes from flashing cameras, a careful sex addict with a rubber allergy?

Or, more to the point, who wouldn’t sympathize with Pandora, a poor horse with a very special problem indeed?

Read and weep a few hay feverish tears:

“A horse stabled in Flackwell Heath suffers from an almost unheard of allergy to grass. Pandora, a five-year-old thoroughbred, is now only allowed out when she is covered from head to hoof in high-tech fibres to protect her, as one blade touching her will trigger a reaction.”

Sad, isn’t it: a horse that can’t roll in the sweet smelling grass?

That’s almost as bad as a doctor telling Paris Hilton she has to stop waxing and start to wear long underwear if she wants to get rid of that rash. Or some specialist telling Oprah she has to stop talking if she wants to avoid throat cancer. Or a Roman Catholic priest who’s been told by his cardiologist that he can’t mess about with little boys anymore.

Truly, of all God’s creatures, the horse should be the last one to develop an allergy for grass…

… okay, apart from cows and deer and sheep…

…and lawnmowers…

…and hippies, I suppose.

Anyway, poor Pandora.