An Equine Conversation Sarah Nickels

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.

I’ll stop here and introduce Maja and let her tell us a heap more.

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.

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.

In this episode of our Special Edition Season on ‘What Else Is There?’, I’m delighted to introduce you to Vicki Jayne Yates and the Facebook group she established with her husband Steve, ‘The Non Ridden Equine’.

This free group that continues to grow weekly with a current membership of over 32,000 people from around the world. I’ve been a member for a number of years now and love being part of such an inclusive, welcoming group and a place where I can draw inspiration on ideas of what activities I can be doing with my horses besides riding.

I wanted to showcase this community to you because I think we can sometimes feel isolated and perhaps lonely if we’re not riding. So much is focused on the ridden world and there can be peer-pressure to ride, I know I’ve faced it. I want you to know that if you are not riding your equines or even if you are, that there is this amazing, international community out there that you can be part of if you’re not already. There are SO many people around the world who have equines that they don’t ride & enjoy in other ways. The Non Ridden Equine Facebook group is somewhere that you can find connection and possibly some inspiration too (listen next week for more on this).

I also find Vicki and Steve’s story with Kez, which inspired the establishment of the group very powerful and wanted to share that with you too.

Enjoy & see you in The Non Ridden Equine Facebook group soon.

I’m so excited to introduce today, our first guest of our Special Edition Season on ‘What Else Is There?’ (besides riding).

I’ll be straight with you and say that one of the joys of podcasting is having a reason to speak to some awesome humans in our industry, because uh, I want to connect with them myself, and today is no exception.

Ellen Cochrane came on my radar a couple of years ago, when someone shared the footage of Ellen’s mule Inara, pushing a soccer ball around an S-bend of poles. It was posted on Ellen’s page that follow’s Inara’s journey, ‘It’s a Mule’s Life’ and it was amazing. This was clearly someone who was a very clever trainer and able to achieve awesome things, and so I started following Ellen’s work.

In parallel with this and probably even before I knew of Ellen, I had heard about Equine Agility and was captivated by the idea. There is so much I love about this as an activity we can be doing with our horses for fun, that hones our training skills broadly with lots of real-world positive impacts, and it also facilitates those who have a competitive drive to compete, while still keeping their horse comfortable as possible as the entries are submitted from home. It’s something that can be done un-mounted on lead and off-lead and also done mounted. There are so many options and the creators have made this opportunity inclusive for so many equines and their humans. I can’t wait to explore it with my equine team.

But, let me stop there as Ellen will explain so much more in the conversation you’re about to hear.

I will just say that I’ll be speaking with Ellen again soon in a future Season of An Equine Conversation as there are so many more things we want to share with you.

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?’.