Hello There
Well, hopefully not terrible exactly, but perhaps not as polished as it could be as the whole point being I’m asking IH Members to check I’m on track for a future webinar I’m doing for professionals.
Sandra Williams, Sharron and I will have the chat feature open, and we’ll open up for live comments at the end.
Possibly one of the reasons the Five-Day Foundation courses were as good as they were was because we always asked for feedback after every course, and we continue to do so after every Horse Psychology course. Receiving honest feedback is tremendously useful.
One of the areas that those of us who ‘have been around a while’ are guilty of is due to ‘The Curse of Knowledge’, meaning forgetting what it was like not to know. On those lines, I put a post up on Facebook recently about ‘don’t forget to check the water temperature before hosing a horse’ (it can be boiling in this weather). It had 971,215 views (to date), which seemed rather extraordinary, and half * the comments were ‘that’s a really good point’ or ‘that caught me out’, and the other half were ‘surely that’s just common sense; who would ever need to be told that?’ (with an eye roll).
*That one’s just a rough figure
Anyway, I was talking to Abi here who has a Master’s in veterinary physiotherapy, and I was saying about some things being a bit obvious, for example, an owner says ‘He’s really difficult to get the headcollar on in the stable’ – so what would you do? And Abi pointed out that there are some equine physios who have no practical experience with horses at all, never mind having one or two tricks up their sleeve, so the answer isn’t ‘common sense’ to many people.
I asked on the Intelligent Horsemanship Trainers group for suggestions as well, and it came up that there are still professionals getting horses in a corner to inject them. And general rough handling going on. Note: We don’t say ‘man’ handling here because we are super politically correct.
And then I have heard of some equine professionals having no education of Learning Theory whatsoever on their course BUT THEN (I’m on a roll now) you get people with no horse experience at all learning a bit about positive and negative reinforcement and thinking “That’s It – I’ve got this horse psychology stuff now” and I recently watched a professional ‘tapping’ a horse to try and get it in a stable and it was cringeworthy – not cruel, I hasten to add or I’d have stopped it, but not taking into account the horse’s emotional state or various practical matters.
There’s one equine course I know of where the psychology part was run by someone with a PhD in rabbits. As Abi and I were making some slides for the talk (OK, Abi was making the slides and I was watching helpfully), she put up a title ‘horses aren’t rabbits’, but then, as I like to question assumptions – I went ‘Or are they?’
Could you teach horse psychology based on what you know about rabbits? What are the similarities? What are the differences? So after going down a virtual rabbit hole (sorry, couldn’t resist that one), we concluded that as rabbits crouch low when they are frightened, whereas horses will use flight. And horses don’t burrow. And although there will be some generalisations such as ‘violence is never the answer’, we feel it’s important to be species specific when studying or teaching.
SO .. if you are an IH Member, it will be lovely if you have time to join us this Wednesday, 8th July to further this discussion and if you’re NOT an IH Member – have a look here, and it only works out at £4.12 a MONTH. (Sharron – is that correct? It sounds far too cheap) (Kelly – yes it is – I’ve been telling you this since I came here in 2020!) JOIN US TODAY at https://intelligenthorsemanship.co.uk/ih-membership-club/#join-now
And as the marketing experts would say, that’s just one cup of coffee a month AND let me tell you that since I’ve given up coffee I sleep SO much better …
You know where we are 😊.
