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.

Sarah Nickels 11/13/24 Sarah Nickels 11/13/24

S5 E2: The Hard

Today, I want to speak about ‘the hard’ in horses. I recently shared a post on our Abbey’s Run Equestrian Facebook page about this & it resonated with a lot of people.

This topic is inspired by those who in the past few months have shared their hard with me, just how tough-a time they’ve had of it, and the thinking and reflection that those conversations have left me with.

I don’t think we share enough about the hard and so this episode aims to change that.

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 11/8/23 Sarah Nickels 11/8/23

S3 E6: How learning with horses can teach young people key life skills - with Bex Tasker

From the age of about 10-11 years old, it was my dream to have my own children’s riding school. I started instructing at 16 and taught a lot of young people. Initially at riding schools & then at Pony Club where I often taught the youngest members, the more junior groups.

In my mid-to-late 20’s, I’d had enough of teaching young people, of dealing with their parents and so I chose to focus on working with adults.

I didn’t realise at that time, that part of the reason I’d had enough was because of the more conventional way I was having to teach people & that this just didn’t sit right with me. At that time, I didn’t know of or see another way. I wasn’t aware of alternative options.

Fast forward to a few years ago, and my initial dream started to re-kindle in a fashion, with sparks, ignited by the work of people like the lovely Bex Tasker from Positively Together in NZ. I started to see a handful of people around the work, having learning adventures with young people that looked absolutely amazing.

This, their approach, different from that conventional way, really got me & I started to have hope that my initial dream, could, in some way, happen in future. For now, this is something that’s still in my future, something I have bubbling along in the back of my mind, but now I have hope. I have hope for amazing alternatives for ways of working with young people and horses, and moreover, I’m so excited by what I’m seeing is possible to support young people learning about working with horses and other species in very cool ways that I wish were around when I was young.

I couldn’t go past inviting Bex to come and have a chat with me here on An Equine Conversation, to share about her own learning journey and how she evolved her career to working with young people & animals, totally busting the myth that it’s something that we shouldn’t do. Bex does amazing work with young people as the learn about training animals and in turn, that’s giving them a bunch of personal development, teaching them invaluable life-skills on how they engage with their peers, families & humans around them. This includes learning about compassion, boundaries, choice & consent. Hugely important life-skills for us all.

I find this work of Bex’s incredibly inspiring, as do others & Bex has more recently started to support other positive reinforcement focused coaches who work with and want to work with young people through her Shaping the Future membership.

This is an episode for anyone who’s involved with young people, not just those in the animal training space. I hope you enjoy and find inspiration in this conversation.