Sarah Weston is a horse lover, and has been a horse owner and trainer for many years.
Copies of her book, No Fear, No Force - A Guide to Handling the Semi-Feral Foal can be obtained direct through her website:
www.sarahweston.co.uk
A really wonderful day at HorseWorld meeting up with Kelly and Monty and Dragon's Den regular Deborah Meaden, all the staff from HorseWorld and many other friends and trustees of the Charity. HorseWorld is IH's Charity of the Year and features in the next Intelligent Horsemanship Magazine which is due out on 1st December. Best get editing then!
A last practise at foot handling today prior to the farrier's first visit on Wednesday. Muffy and her two daughters, Milly and Molly, and son Puck, all lined up at the gate asking to be caught and then let me pick out and scrub their feet. They all need a good trim and treatment for thrush.
End
of the week. Another really successful course with head collars quietly going
on foals within a short time of starting
work and the ponies all looking much happier about the proximity of humans. The
top graduate was Suki, a pony that had taken to clicker training immediately.
All of the students did an amazing job: no fear, no force, no drama and no
ego. The feedback was really positive:
“...anyone
who wants to be empathetic to horse-kind would benefit from attending the
course.” HW
“Loved,
loved, loved it! The opportunity to work with the foals is priceless.” CT
“Just
all round wonderful, tutors, ponies, Sarah W. Really inspirational.” SET
“It
was very good to swap tutors as they all have different ideas and all tutor in
a different way” DH
"Thank you so much for the most amazing week. I went through such a range of emotions from fear, doubt, lack of confidence to love, trust, acceptance and belief in my ability. Wow!" JH "We learned so much about ourselves, such an honour to work with such magical little souls, I feel very humbled. How generous of them to teach us so much in such a short space of time. Therapists would have charged us a fortune for that amount of treatment and diagnosis!" GC
Slight
embarrassment on Tuesday morning when three of the ponies has disappeared overnight.
Hedgehog, Magic and Layla, three much older ponies - two tame and one wild -
had quietly undone the knots on the gate and wandered off up the track. Having
tiptoed across the cattle grid, they had headed off to the nearest moor and
apparently evaporated. We knew that they would be fine and their owner just
through it was funny. Half way through Wednesday morning Ro came to tell us
that she had spotted them on the roadside at Hollow Tor just above the farm,
but by the time we had gone back to bring them in, they were nowhere to be
seen. A brief search revealed two bays and a grey standing on a rocky outcrop
and fortunately it was them. Armed with a bucket and head collar we were able
to persuade Hedgehog to come and be caught and she led the way down the road
with the other two following behind. Perhaps the torrential rain had something
to do with it but even the wild pony thought it was a good idea to come home.
David
and I had the afternoon off and visited the Devon Wildlife Hospital where we
met several real hedgehogs rescued following various accidents and incidents.
We were encouraged to open up a Hedgehog Street (visit www.hedgehogstreet.org for
details)
A
joyful return to Dartmoor this last week for the Foal Handling Course. With 9
students and 12 ponies, 6 tutors and 3 members of the DPTC team, 3 was the
magic number. We were able to set up on Sunday in record time having planned
ahead for over a year.
We
are always striving to get to the softest, safest method of training foals. At the beginning of the week we were joined by
Zoopharmacognosist, Fiona Habershon, to see whether the foals would benefit
from oils, herbs and macerates. On
Monday morning Yarrow and Valerian were dropped on to our feather dusters as we
began to work with the foals and they certainly seemed to be very chilled out.
There
is no pony wrangling here in any event. No pulling ponies around or over with
ropes around their necks or insisting that they face their trainer with both
eyes; where ponies are happy to accept food from the hand we begin clicker
training straight away and for those that are worried about being so close to
humans we use the feather duster to establish first touch. As a result both
ponies and people are very quiet and there is the air of a library about the
whole thing.
I am helping with a small experiment on the Forest which means that this morning I have stuck reflective stickers all over my New Forest ponies. This was the brainwave of Steve Kitcher, Editor of NFED, who first noticed that ponies that had been bought through the sales and turned out with their lot numbers still attached were highly visible in the dark. He has arranged for a supply of white ones that people can attach to their ponies to see how long they last and whether they do make the ponies more obvious in the dark.
Probably not the best angle to take a picture of one of the most beautiful horses I have seen. This is Carter the Connemara and he really is a delicious creature. Trouble is he knows it and thinks that some things may be out to eat him. Today we did some very simple groundwork and made a start on desensitisation with a shoot going on in one field and a dressage compeititon in another. It will be good to allay some of his fears and turn him into a mini police horse.
Where a horse has a habit of shooting forward when he is worried it is worth giving up carrying a whip at all even if it is only ever used as an extension of the hand or at a distance when lunging. The problem for these horses may be that they have met a whip used for a very different purpose and they find it very hard to forgive and forget. Many horses are hit for being frightened for example and then they are not just afraid, they are afraid of being afraid. I haven't carried a whip for well over ten years now and have never missed it. I understand the argument about the whip being an extension of the hand but, if that is the case, why are we using something that is thin and sharp and invisible to the horse, rather than something that is clearly visible and hand-like - surely not just because of the weight of it? When a horse has met a whip in punishing circumstances, it will always be a strong aversive in his mind. This is why I don't accept the argument from jockeys that the racing whip doesn't hurt - it might not (although I doubt that too) but the ones used at home in training certainly do.
