Tag Archive for: Transporting horses

Don’t break your vet…

Equine vets have one of the highest injury risks of all civilian professions. To help address this serious issue the British Equine Veterinary Association (BEVA) has produced a series of short videos, featuring vet Gemma Pearson MRCVS who is doing research on horse behaviour

The videos provide quick and simple ways of teaching horses to be quiet, relaxed and safe for injections, clipping, worming, examinations and other veterinary procedures.

Having met Gemma and seen more of her work I can only suggest you take time to watch and learn!

Links to the other videos are here.

Learning to stand still and be calmer

Head shy Horses

Calm clipping 

Barging horse – leading and safer loading

 

Wobbling in your learning

For Liz the relationship with Luca and unpicking his issues was a life lesson about riding and training horses.  His ‘resistance’ turned out to be response to Wobbler syndrome and looking back there were a number of other signs too.

Even low level pain can affect a horse’s behaviour, and these changes can be the first sign of a veterinary issue. This led Liz to awareness of how  common schooling techniques such as working in deep surfaces, excessive lunging, lack of road work and overuse of gadgets  can cause significant long term impacts. Understanding the bio-mechanics of horse and rider, and riding with softness and suppleness in mind are key. Allowing the horse time to develop is also a key philosophy.

Old fashioned approaches of ‘sorting an horse out’ and riding through mis-behaviour can bring short term results, but may not help your horse stay sound or develop trust in the longer term. After all, horses simply don’t spend time plotting how to evade work and annoy the rider…