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 12/11/24 Sarah Nickels 12/11/24

S5 E6: The Horse’s Mouth - with Dr Paul Owens

I am so pleased to be welcoming our 2nd first time guest to An Equine Conversation for Season 5: our most wonderful Equine Veterinary Dentist, Dr Paul Owens from the Horse Vet Dentist.

I won’t lie, I used to think the horses mouth was a whole lot simpler than it is. For many years, my horses had an annual visit from an equine dental technician. I’d seen a couple of talks given by them & I thought I knew much of what there was to know. Gosh, how wrong I was! It was thanks to a number of wonderful horsie friends whose opinions I rate, who were working with Dr Paul Owens and singing his praises, that we too got Paul on board our horse-care team maybe 4-5 years ago now. And wow, have we learnt so much over that time. Paul’s knowledge is amazing, as is his preparedness to educate interested owners. Each time Paul’s here, which is every 6-months, there are things I learn and get to see with my own eyes in my horses mouths which is really impactful for my understanding.

We really love having Paul as part of our herd’s care team as we share the mission of improving welfare for equines through our work and both love learning more, with Paul bringing us information on the latest research into all things horses mouths. Not only that, but we get to hear some cool stories about the work he does with Zoo’s Victoria too. Which, for those of you who like me, train with positive reinforcement, mean that Paul is already really familiar with this training approach as he sees it in action in his work with the Zoo & is so awesome in supporting what I do with my herd, which can be to our amusement. In his visit here just a few weeks ago, Rufus is such a pro at loading on the crush, we’ve made it so positively reinforcing for him, that he took himself there before we were even ready for him.

In today’s episode, we’re going to peer inside the horse’s mouth with Paul and learn a bunch about how it works and equine oral health care.

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.

S2 E3: Why ruling out pain in horses is hard with Dr Lisa Walter

How many people do you know who’ve had some kind of pain or illness that the human medical professionals have not been able to get to the bottom of or provide relief from? Or where it’s taken some time and robust investigations, often driven by the person or their family to figure out what’s going on?

I know quite a few & have experienced this myself, and this is with the diagnostics available to human medicine.

Almost daily I see equine-owning humans asking for training help online with a horse that’s body language and behaviour is indicating likely pain. Sometimes this body language from the horse is fairly explicit and other times it’s more subtle. Some of the lovely humans asking for help have sought some veterinary intervention, but it can happen that their initial vet hasn’t been able to find anything wrong.

If you listened to Episode 8 in Season 1 of An Equine Conversation, Julia’s story with her horse Maddy, you’ll know that Maddy was exhibiting behaviour that indicated something was wrong and that Julia had to push past initial vet suggestions to get to the point of an actual diagnosis for what was wrong, and then how to treat and manage what was going on for him. It took some time and probing and pushing to figure it out.

And here’s the thing. Pain in horses is not always possible to rule out or resolve. It’s not a matter of just saying there’s nothing wrong – because there can be and the science and diagnostic equipment just isn’t there yet to figure absolutely everything out – but, the science, the technology and the research are making progress and there’s so much more available to us than 20 years ago.

I wanted to talk to an Equine Veterinarian about why it’s challenging to rule out pain in horses and what we can and should do about it as owners, so I asked my friend, Dr Lisa Walter, Equine Vet in South Australia, if she would join me for a chat. I always love speaking with Lisa as she has so much knowledge and a constant curiosity about how the horses body works – which has led her to working on a PhD in Sacroilliac dysfunction. I’m so pleased to bring this conversation to you and hope it helps expand your knowledge, awareness, understanding and ability to pursue niggles about any pain you are suspect of with your equines.