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A podcast by Abbey’s Run Equestrian

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


Season 5 Trailer
Sarah Nickels Sarah Nickels

Season 5 Trailer

Hello lovely listener! I am so excited to be back & bringing you this, our first Special Edition Season of An Equine Conversation.

Just like previous Seasons of the podcast, Season 4 includes 8 episodes, the first of which will drop next Wednesday.

Check out this trailer to hear just what the topic of this Special Edition Season is.

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

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.

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S4 E7: Cooperative Care with Peggy Hogan
Sarah Nickels Sarah Nickels

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.

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S4 E6: Equine Enrichment with Maja Bagdziun
Sarah Nickels Sarah Nickels

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.

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S4 E5: Horse Play with Nicky Ross
Sarah Nickels Sarah Nickels

S4 E5: Horse Play with Nicky Ross

This episode of our Special Edition Season on ‘What Else Is There?’ we are connecting with the far west coast of Scotland to speak with today’s guest Nicky Ross, owner of the business Horse Play.

I first discovered Nicky some years back through a training group we were both in on Facebook and I saw some of the lovely videos she was sharing of her work, teaching one of her ponies to go in harness, purely training using positive reinforcement. Nicky was based in England at that point, and then I watched from afar as Nicky and family moved to Scotland – much jealously from us, except for the midges – to the far west coast. Since then, Nicky has evolved her activities with her ponies and her human learners to work with the amazing environment there.

I really enjoy seeing what Nicky and crew are getting up to – things that I can only dream about where I am. Once again, the beauty of having a podcast means I could reach out & was so pleased to have the opportunity to speak with Nicky and hear more about her background, approach, the diversity activities that go on, and what makes Nicky’s heart smile & feel true in how she connects and helps her human learners connect with equines. I really resonate with a lot of Nicky’s approach and I’m delighted to share some more inspiration with you, our listeners this episode.

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S4 E4: An Owner’s Story - with Chris & Michael Fallon
Sarah Nickels Sarah Nickels

S4 E4: An Owner’s Story - with Chris & Michael Fallon

This episode of our Special Edition Season on ‘What Else Is There?’ takes a little bit of a different view. Today, instead of us meeting with those who engage in this space in a more professional capacity, it is my pleasure to introduce you to a couple who are horse-owners and to share their, very personal but very inspiring journey.

I connected with Chris and Michael Fallon, based in the United States, as a result of the post I put up and shared into the Non Ridden Equine Facebook group, asking what fun, non-ridden activities were people getting up to with their equine friends. Chris posted a comment that included the most delightful video montage of a bunch of tricks their horse Pirate was doing, many with her husband Michael. The video, especially Michael’s joy as he played with Pirate & Pirates engagement, made me chuckle, filled me with joy and I made a point of showing it to Benn, for him to see another male having fun in this way. We were both tickled.

So I reached out to Chris and invited her and Michael to join me for a conversation, to share their experiences with you as other owners who are not professionals in the ethical horse world. To my delight, they were happy to chat with me so that their story could inspire others. I think a really key part of Chris and Michael’s story is that their horse Pirate CAN be ridden at this point, unlike Vicki’s Kez that we spoke about last week. Pirate can be ridden and still they are having a fabulous time with him from the ground.

I am incredibly grateful to Chris and Michael for meeting with me and so openly sharing this personal story with me and now you. I hope it leaves you feeling inspired about what’s possible with your equine friends.

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

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?’.

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Season 4 Trailer
Sarah Nickels Sarah Nickels

Season 4 Trailer

Hello lovely listener! I am so excited to be back & bringing you this, our first Special Edition Season of An Equine Conversation.

Just like previous Seasons of the podcast, Season 4 includes 8 episodes, the first of which will drop next Wednesday.

Check out this trailer to hear just what the topic of this Special Edition Season is.

Read More
S3 E7: The Wine Cellar
Sarah Nickels Sarah Nickels

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.

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S3 E5: Farts & Unicorns
Sarah Nickels Sarah Nickels

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.

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S3 E1: Movin’ to the country - with Benn Sheffield
Sarah Nickels Sarah Nickels

S3 E1: Movin’ to the country - with Benn Sheffield

This episode of An Equine Conversation is quite a different one:

In late 2015, Benn & I moved to the country, from the outer suburbs of Melbourne. Yep, we did eat a lot of peaches initially (we knew people with a prolifically producing tree), and have since planted 2 peach trees of our own LOL. For me, moving to the country had been a dream since I can remember (I can’t remember a time I didn’t want my own ‘farm’) and for Benn who grew up on a hobby-farm but then moved into town for study & work, returning to a more rural lifestyle was something he always intended to do. Here we are, almost 8 years on (sometimes it feels like 5 minutes, other times, forever) & while it’s an awful lot of work, for the most part, we absolutely love it.

Inspired by our friend and Podcast Producer Matthew Bliss & his wife Bernadine & their podcast ‘From My Home To Yours’, Benn (who had volunteered to come on a podcast episode) and I thought we’d take a moment to reflect on our experience of moving from one type of lifestyle to another. Something we haven’t really stopped to do like this since we moved almost 8 years ago now. It was an awesome opportunity to reflect on some of the challenges, some of the awesomeness & some of the differences we found in moving to the country, to live on our 40 acres. We thought you might enjoy listening in and sharing on our revisiting some of the most memorable changes.

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Season 3 Trailer
Sarah Nickels Sarah Nickels

Season 3 Trailer

Hello lovely listener! We are delighted to be back with Season 3 of An Equine Conversation, a podcast brought to you by Abbey’s Run Equestrian. I’m your host, Sarah Nickels.

Just like the previous Seasons, Season 3 includes 8 episodes (plus this trailer). Episodes will drop on a Wednesday morning, Melbourne/Sydney time. We’re dropping our first episode next Wednesday, October 4th.

Check out this trailer for a glimpse of what’s coming up this Season & to find out about the free challenge we have starting next week (October 5th) and our next intake of our young and/or green horse program, From Green to Growth: developing positive partnerships for the future.

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

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.

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S2 E4: The ‘truth’ in buying a horse
Sarah Nickels Sarah Nickels

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.

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