Horse handling for the less confident person

We had lovely weather on Saturday for our popular course "Horse handling for the less confident person". This confidence building day is about learning how to be in be control of horses and ponies -whether they are loose, whether we are interacting with them in small/enclosed spaces, or if we are leading them.

We always tailor the course towards the individual needs of the participants and the particular issues they would like to address. On this course, one of the special topics we covered was catching the "difficult to catch horse or pony", which is one of my favourite subjects. Once people learn to understand horse body language, and understand how their own human body language affects the horse, catching is no longer a problem. Being able to go out and interact with our herd of ponies means that people can practice their skills. Faye helps students to interpret the signals from the ponies, and helps students to perfect their techniques.

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We finished the day by taking Muddy for a walk - this helped to bring all the day's teaching together. Everyone was able to confidently handle him, even though Muddy was an unfamiliar pony to them, and participants were able to deal with different scenarios, such as what to do if your pony refuses to move...and how to safely pass tractors and traffic.

We received excellent feedback ratings about all the aspects of the course - for the quality of the teaching, the theory and practical content, and the overall experience on the day.

Feedback comments "Great to be able to put it all into practice. Good balance of theory and practical. Certainly made us think about how our actions give reactions to the ponies".

Photos from the day: above - Faye teaching in the yard, with pony Bobby and course participant Louise listening to the instructions! Below - (left) putting the theory and techniques into practice on each other, before trying it with the ponies. (upper right) A very nice example of how to ask a pony to take a few steps backwards. (Lower right) Returning to the yard with Muddy after taking him for a walk to put the day's teaching into practice.

Horse handling for the less confident person

Today I ran an extra date of "Horse handling for the less confident person", which is one of my favourite days to teach. It's really lovely to see people grow in confidence during the day and begin to realise that they can understand horses and ponies and be comfortable and in control around them. It's really important that people can ask lots of questions and they finally get the answers to why horses do certain things. So often people have observed really interesting equine situations and behaviours, but they feel puzzled as to what was actually happening in that situation. It's great to help them have those light bulb moments when things suddenly fall into place.

In the morning we covered some theory about horse behaviour and psychology, and after practicing our skills human-to-human, we headed out into the field to put the knowledge into practice. In fact, getting to interact with and observe the p4p herd is one of the most popular parts of this course!! The ponies are the best teachers of all!!

After lunch, we looked at how to feel at ease around horses when interacting with them in a stable...and finally, I taught safe leading techniques...which we practised with several different ponies. In the photo, Rocky is really concentrating on his handler during leading practice.

Course feedback:"For me, I really enjoyed spending time in the field with the herd and find their behaviour fascinating...Faye is very good at teaching and has great patience with you and she is very easy to get along with. I asked many questions and she was happy to answer them all. Thank you very much for a great day".