S4 E6: Equine Enrichment with Maja Bagdziun
I’m excited to introduce our next topic & guest on our Special Edition Season of An Equine Conversation, focusing on ‘What Else Is There?’ besides riding.
I suspect some of your will be familiar with the work of Maja Bagdziun. Maja shares a heap of beautiful, inspiring training videos through her Facebook page: Hear Your Horse Whisper - science based information and education and two Facebook groups: Enrichment for Horses and No Drama Pony Training.
Once again, An Equine Conversation is giving me an excuse to speak to yet another individual who’s work I have been admiring for some time. I find Maja’s training lovely to watch, very creative and inspiring, using the environment she has to work with and a bunch of lateral thinking.
I love enrichment as something we can do with our equine’s that has loads of benefits and is a pretty easy and can be very cost-effective activity. I know how much I enjoy working with my herd on different enrichment activities & I wanted to share this with you. I know that Maja too is passionate about using enrichment as part of her ponies lives… and I imagine too for her new goat additions – you’ll have to watch her Facebook spaces to see more of goat training fun as well.
I strongly suspect that some of you are already using enrichment with your equines, whether you give it that label or not, and those who aren’t will likely be heading outside to play after listening to this episode.
I’ll stop here and introduce Maja and let her tell us a heap more.
Maja Bagdziun:
Maja is an animal lover who has committed time to explore behavioural science, ethology, cognition, affective neuroscience (emotions), calming signals and enrichment in dogs and horses. She uses an evidence based approach to work with animals and positive reinforcement is her main tool of interaction and training.
Having had graduated with Educational Psychology she has the academic background that helps her to understand how not just humans but also animals learn.
She's passionate about modern horse training that incorporates cognition, emotion, ethology, biology and attachment theory which allows her to consider an animal in front of her in a holistic way.
She's passionate about sharing her knowledge and skills with the others and runs a Facebook Page and Groups that are dedicated to education, science based training and interactions with horses as well as providing everyday enrichment ideas to help make horses lives better.
‘Enrichment For Horses’ Facebook group:
Maja set up her Enrichment for Horses group in 2019 with the original aim to share her own experience of exposing her rescue ponies to enrichment items to stimulate their natural SEEKING system, curiosity and cognitive skills.
She started off with introducing a novel item each day but quickly learned that this was not an appropriate approach for her rescue pony Charisma who needed predictability and consistency to learn to trust the humans and his new environment. This lead Maja to abandon the original idea of introducing items everyday and instead she's opened to group to public audience and invited people to share their own ideas while taking a slower and more predictable approach in her own enrichment journey with her ponies. The group has since grown massively and has now got over 35k followers.
In this episode we discuss:
1:21 - episode introduction
2:13 - introducing Maja & the Enrichment For Horses Facebook group
9:40 - what is ‘enrichment’ and what is it for equines?
10:57 - how did Maja get interested in enrichment for horses
12:27 - the rescue ponies: Cracker & Charisma
14:03 - more about the ponies
17:36 - what motivated you to set up the Enrichment For Horses Fb group
20:06 - why provide enrichment?
26:42 - enrichment in the Zoo world
30:39 - building curiosity, focus, & the importance of teaching horses to participate in enrichment
32:23 - ‘real-world’ benefits of equines engaging in enrichment
35:32 - enrichment with or without food
43:00 - giving fearful horses the opportunities to learn & needing to help the animal learn how to engage
48:36 - behaviour modelling
52:39 - enrichment activity examples
1:01:47 - another benefit & more examples
1:05:59 - safety warning - common sense required
1:09:42 - where to find out more
1:10:47 - episode wrap-up, keeping in touch & what’s on next week
Links from Maja:
Hear Your Horse Whisper - science based information and education - Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063798690549
Enrichment For Horses - Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2609672455794356/?ref=share
No Drama Pony Training - Facebook Group: https://m.facebook.com/groups/1588766501481423/?ref=share
Enrichment topics:
Working for food as Enrichment - Contra Free Loading: https://www.facebook.com/share/v/WTUUSg29PCaHB2B6/?ref=share
Cognitive Enrichment - Problem Solving: https://fb.watch/rqcBZXdCtZ/
Environmental Enrichment - life on tracks: https://www.facebook.com/share/v/uj1yrKF1JUXyU4ee/
Environmental Enrichment - feeing in multiple places: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/XmvFvpWEmnjH8Ghh/
Combining training with Enrichment: https://fb.watch/rqcHDFdF1i/
Play in Enriched Environment: https://www.facebook.com/share/v/4Pm9BMiQ2E5wpNcK/
Enrichment Playground: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/Vqacq9Gzx8gzxH9t/
Jonny enrichment: https://www.facebook.com/share/v/HWVfpoueQUF4WWmQ/
Our links mentioned this episode:
Abbey's Run Equestrian website
Abbey's Run Equestrian on Facebook
Thank you to Matthew Bliss for podcast production & consultation. If you'd like him to help with your podcast, get in touch by email at business@mbpod.com