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 5/22/24 Sarah Nickels 5/22/24

S4 E8: Equine Scent Detection with Dee Horwood & Cortney McCartney

This is the FINAL EPISODE of our Special Edition Season of An Equine Conversation on ‘What Else Is There?’ besides riding.

Last but by no means least, I’m absolutely delighted to welcome our Australian guests for the season, Dee Horwood & Cortney McCartney, owners of the business Scent Horses Australia.

Cortney is, I think, only the 2nd person we’ve had on the podcast who I’ve actually met in person, and lives only 2 hours from me. Not only that but Cortney’s horse, the one used to proof the scent detecting concept is a half sibling to my horse Rufus, so technically, we’re like extended family yea?

Dee & Cortney are joining me to share their story of getting involved in Equine Scent Detection training fun – a journey that was inspired by a conversation Cortney had when visiting Canada back in I think it was 2011. We’re talking about the awesomeness that is scent detecting with equines. This was such a fun conversation and these humans have such a great story.

I’m so excited to help raise the profile of what’s possible here & what these two awesome humans are getting up to.

At the end of the episode, stay tune for a bunch of end of Season announcements.

Sarah Nickels 5/15/24 Sarah Nickels 5/15/24

S4 E7: Cooperative Care with Peggy Hogan

In this episode of our Special Edition Season of An Equine Conversation, focusing on ‘What Else Is There?’ besides riding, we welcome the incredibly experienced & knowledgeable, Peggy Hogan to chat with us on the topic of Cooperative Care.

Cooperative Care may be a new term for some of you. It’s something that is used or can, or we could perhaps say should be used widely in the animal world, including with our equines. But I’ll let Peggy tell you more on this shortly.

Some people may think of Cooperative care as boring, but I think it is anything but & find it amazing & totally fascinating. I know Peggy shares my feelings and has done a heap of learning about & exploring cooperative care with the equines in her world.

Cooperative care is something we could and really should all be training with our horses, to make daily care activities a breeze & emergency care activities less stressful. It also has the most wonderful flow-on effects to all our training and the relationship we have with our equines, so it is well worth investing our time into.

Sarah Nickels 4/10/24 Sarah Nickels 4/10/24

S4 E2: Equine Agility - with Ellen Cochrane

I’m so excited to introduce today, our first guest of our Special Edition Season on ‘What Else Is There?’ (besides riding).

I’ll be straight with you and say that one of the joys of podcasting is having a reason to speak to some awesome humans in our industry, because uh, I want to connect with them myself, and today is no exception.

Ellen Cochrane came on my radar a couple of years ago, when someone shared the footage of Ellen’s mule Inara, pushing a soccer ball around an S-bend of poles. It was posted on Ellen’s page that follow’s Inara’s journey, ‘It’s a Mule’s Life’ and it was amazing. This was clearly someone who was a very clever trainer and able to achieve awesome things, and so I started following Ellen’s work.

In parallel with this and probably even before I knew of Ellen, I had heard about Equine Agility and was captivated by the idea. There is so much I love about this as an activity we can be doing with our horses for fun, that hones our training skills broadly with lots of real-world positive impacts, and it also facilitates those who have a competitive drive to compete, while still keeping their horse comfortable as possible as the entries are submitted from home. It’s something that can be done un-mounted on lead and off-lead and also done mounted. There are so many options and the creators have made this opportunity inclusive for so many equines and their humans. I can’t wait to explore it with my equine team.

But, let me stop there as Ellen will explain so much more in the conversation you’re about to hear.

I will just say that I’ll be speaking with Ellen again soon in a future Season of An Equine Conversation as there are so many more things we want to share with you.

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 11/1/23 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 10/25/23 Sarah Nickels 10/25/23

S3 E4: Crib-biting: a game changing study - with Dr Michaela Hempen

It was a few years back now when I first heard about Dr Michaela Hempen’s Masters Research on Crib-biting, which, for those uninitiated, is a stereotypic behaviour that horses can develop. I heard about the research and then had the good fortune to see some of the timeline film of the project thanks to Alexandra Kurland.

There is not much now, after so long in the horse world that really captures my attention strongly, but wow, Michaela’s research blew my mind – it still does. I was captivated watching the footage, absolutely glued to the screen to see it all in as much detail as I could take in.

I think the findings from Michaela’s work are absolutely game-changing in terms of how we view, understand and then manage crib-biting in horses. I am so moved by Michaela and the broader teams work in this space and the implications it has for the welfare of cribbing horses. I look forward to further research happening on crib-biting & other equine stereotypies.

Since I heard about this research, anyone mentions crib-biting and I vomit excitement about Michaela’s research all over them… so I was itching to have Michaela come and speak with me to share this with you, our An Equine Conversation listeners so I could point people to this conversation instead of trying to explain the research and findings myself.

There is so much to talk about & this is a long episode… but we still ran out of time & need to talk again.