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 5/15/24 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.

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.

S3 E2: The differences & similarities in training dogs and horses with Hannah Branigan

I am ridiculously excited to have Hannah Branigan as our guest on An Equine Conversation this episode.

If you don’t know Hannah’s work, you should make a point of getting to know it. Hannah’s education programs and content in the animal training space with a focus on dogs is next level excellent. Her podcast, Drinking from the Toilet that I’ve mentioned a couple of times in the past on An Equine Conversation and have recommended to many people, is one of my favourites for insightful training information, looking at all the shades of grey in the training space and the best part is that it’s presented in a really authentic way. While Drinking from the Toilet has a dog focus, so much of the conversation directly relates to training horses & other species.

For a while now, I’ve wanted to do an episode on An Equine Conversation about the differences & similarities between training dogs and horses. I know the vast majority of horse people also have dogs. And I see regularly a really fascinating thing happen where people will train their dog with positive reinforcement, yet they don’t apply the same training approach with their horses. There seems to be a long-held belief in a large part of the horse-world that we can’t train horses with positive reinforcement, we can’t train them using food. That using food would be bribing them, will make them muggy, yet we’re often comfortable to train our dogs using food. FYI This isn’t the case – we can train horses using positive reinforcement and it’s super effective & people around the world are doing it with awesome success.

I wanted to unpack the differences but also the similarities between training dogs and horses. I’m a huge fan of Hannah’s and I know that Hannah is not only amazingly awesome in her work with dogs, she also has horses. I reckoned Hannah might be the perfect person to unpack this conversation with me.

I was beyond delighted when Hannah agreed to come and chat with us & I managed to restrain myself from fan-girling at her too much. We had a super interesting conversation where Hannah shared some of her lesser known story with horses.

It won’t surprise anyone who knows Hannah’s work to know that we got into some training weeds and a more in-depth but totally awesome conversation than maybe I had planned. …. A conversation which I’m so excited to share with you. Enjoy!