An Equine Conversation

Welcome to An Equine Conversation, a podcast brought to you by Abbey’s Run Equestrian.

This podcast aims to help you, the horse owner, improve your knowledge by giving you access to top quality information that will help you be the best horse owner you can be so that you can give your horses the best life possible.

Through An Equine Conversation, I’ll share my expertise with you along with helping you connect to and hear from some amazing experts in their own fields – because while I have a lot of knowledge, I am by no means the expert in all of the things. We’ll also be talking with horse owners about their journey with their animals.

We’ll explore ways our horses can be physically and mentally healthier through topics around training, horse-health, enrichment, emergency preparedness, history, our own mental wellbeing and physical health and more. We’ll be giving you practical actions you can implement with your horses and information to explore, consider and further investigate.

These podcast episodes are absolutely designed to be thought-provoking and they may bring you some ideas, approaches or information that you haven’t come across previously.

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

Sarah Nickels 4/3/24 Sarah Nickels 4/3/24

S4 E1: Why this special edition season - ‘What Else Is There?’

I have spent many hours thinking about bringing this Special Edition Season of An Equine Conversation to you, and then of course planning & sourcing guests & editing episodes.

The more I thought about it, the more and more important and the clearer the WHY for this episode became to me. And it seemed more than what was sensible to fit into the already long Season Trailer, so here we are at Episode 1, talking about the why. Why we are producing a Special Edition of An Equine Conversation on ‘What else is there?’.

Sarah Nickels 11/15/23 Sarah Nickels 11/15/23

S3 E7: The Wine Cellar

Let me invite you today, to come for a little journey into the wine cellar with me, which is kind of ironic, given I don’t drink alcohol, but hey, I can still appreciate the amazingness that is a wine cellar… so come on this little journey with me.

Why are we going to the wine cellar? Well, for very, very good reason:

Because, we have a tendency to start training our horses on the ground floor or somewhere above it, so, in the middle instead of at the beginning, instead of starting down in the gloriousness that is the wine cellar.

I think we do this for a variety of very legitimate reasons, but it often leads us into a pickle in lots of ways with training our horses where we get ourselves stuck or facing problems.

I hear some of you cry here, ‘but but but, I am not a horse trainer, I am an owner and I work with a trainer so this episode can’t be for me’… and I’m here to tell you that anyone who works with or cares for any animal, anywhere is a trainer – regardless of whether we’re conscious of it or not. So yep, if you care for a horse or any other animal, you are a trainer & this episode, this visit to the wine cellar is for you. As if you don’t want to go to the wine cellar anyway!?

In today’s episode I’m going to speak to the training that comes before the training. Because that piece is inextricably connected to just how successful any training, which I say in inverted commas, is.

So let’s head down the stairs into the cool of the wine cellar together and get started.

Sarah Nickels 11/1/23 Sarah Nickels 11/1/23

S3 E5: Farts & Unicorns

Today’s episode is a really short & snappy one, dare I say, a mini-sode.

Despite being short, it’s an important one, where I’m sharing 2 valuable training tips that I’ve been talking about with my students for more than a decade: farts & unicorns. These are two training tips you can take away immediately and incorporate into your training.

A short episode, but one I hope you find really helpful.

And now I best explain just what I mean by farts & unicorns. Listen to find out.

Sarah Nickels 5/31/23 Sarah Nickels 5/31/23

S2 E6: Set up for success: it takes a team

We want your training with your horse to be fun & enjoyable for your both – in short, we want you to be really successful in your training.

When we think about training with our horses & being successful with our training, we often think about the time when we're actively training 1:1 with our horse... but there is a whole bunch of stuff that comes before the active training part that is inextricably connected to how successful any active training will be or not.

Some of the things that come before take some time to put in place & others can be done more rapidly. The very cool thing too, is that the more we get in place and the more practiced we get at setting ourselves and our horses up for success, the faster it becomes over time. So while initially, it might take some conscious, focused thought and actions – it will become easier over time.

Setting ourselves up for success is something we will be exploring in greater detail with you awesome humans who get involved in our virtual young & green horse program that launches on the 1st of August 2023… but setting ourselves & our horses up for success is so important & we wanted to touch on it here, through An Equine Conversation too.

There is so much we could talk about on how we set ourselves and our horses up for success but today we’re going to follow on from something we mentioned super briefly in Series 2, Episode 3 of An Equine Conversation with Dr Lisa Walter – that it takes a team.

Sarah Nickels 5/17/23 Sarah Nickels 5/17/23

S2 E4: The ‘truth’ in buying a horse

In my almost 3 decades of teaching people with horses, there are some things I have been asked about many times. Questions around or support in buying a new horse has been one of these.

Horse shopping, much like property shopping, can be an emotional roller-coaster of an experience. Then when you finally land on which equine and have your new partner home, things may not go, in fact often they don’t go, quite as you imagined they would.

In this episode I’m going to speak to the ‘truth’ in buying a horse, whether that be your first, second, third or tenth horse.