We share your passion
September 2018
Whether your horse is un-started or already going under saddle, but you feel these are areas that need a little work, you’re in the right place. In this exclusive training series, Kate Fenner from Kandoo Equine is taking us deep into the essential foundation lessons for any horse.
June 2018
Now in its 14th year, Horses Helping Humans (HHH) has recently won its third Business Award this year for ‘Youth and Children’s Services 2018’. Founder Sue Spence invites you to become a licensee and facilitator for this internationally renowned horsemanship and life skills program.
June 2018
Horse riding is dangerous. I’m not going to go into the statistics on horse-related injury and fatality because they are far from straightforward. Do you calculate injury rates per ride, per hour spent in the saddle or per jump attempt? Suffice to say that all accidents range from annoying to tragic, and the statistics for any sport as a whole are not going to matter when an accident happens to you or someone you know.
Australian Equine Behaviour Centre - www.aebc.com.au Elsa Willans-Davis is a full-time trainer at the Australian Equine Behaviour Centre in Broadford, Victoria. She is adept at training and teaching all facets of the AEBC training system from foundation training through to problem solving, dressage and jumping.
Australian Equine Behaviour Centre - www.aebc.com.au In this Part 2 of our series I will explain how I train the basic responses of “go forward” and “stop” from the ground. Before you start
Many people wrongly expect the horse will know he is supposed to stand still when he is tied up or is in a horse box, when in reality we should first train every horse that once you ask him to stop, he should not move nor follow you until you ask him to do so with your lead rope or reins. This is what we call 'Park'.
Australian Equine Behaviour Centre - www.aebc.com.au
In the last article, Part 4 of this series, I explained why and how I train horses to yield the shoulders. The next training task is to teach him to yield his hindquarters.
Australian Equine Behaviour Centre - www.aebc.com.au Head control The prerequisites to training head control in hand are training your horse to go, stop, step back, and park at obedience level (see parts 1 – 5 of the series).
April 2017
Angela Brown’s business is training: both horses and people. She didn’t begin her equestrian journey until she got her first horse at the age of 28 and perhaps entering the horse world as an adult gave her a fresh perspective. In Angela’s line of work, working with horses is as simple as two concepts: mastering the basics and staying safe.
October 2012
With the new foal on the ground you feel that you need to do everything possible to ensure it gets handled properly. You may have heard of imprinting and you think you should try it. However, imprinting foals may not be what it seems...
October 2012
Overshadowing is a technique developed at the Australian Equine Behaviour Centre to habituate horses to objects and situations they find scary. Habituation is a natural form of learning, in which an animal, after a period of exposure to a stimulus, stops responding.
May 2011
Clicker training is extensively used very successfully to train all sorts of animals but is still not widely accepted for training horses, mostly due to a lack of understanding about how horses learn, and the whole concept of negative and positive reinforcement. As riders and trainers, we generally train horses using negative reinforcement (pressure/release). Pressure, such as from our reins or legs, motivates the horse to offer a response. When he gives the desired response, we remove the pressure. The removal of pressure reinforces the behaviour that preceded it.
October 2010
Horses are naturally wary of small spaces and they tend to avoid confinement so will often react by showing various expressions of flight response. The three most common situations where horses need to walk into a small space and be confined are floats and trucks, vet crushes and racing barriers. In the May issue I explained the float training process (to view click here), and in this article I will focus on vet crushes and race barriers. The training process for all three is very similar.
June 2010
Float loading is not about how much the horse trusts you or your leadership skills, it is really about your horse being obedient to your go and stop signals in hand. It’s quite natural for horses to want to avoid places like floats that are dark, narrow, noisy and confined, and no wonder they don’t always want to load into them, but the reason they don’t actually load is they don’t lead very well.
