Feb 20, 2024
Thoughts and feelings from our February Clinic Review.
No two clinics are ever the same.
Different horses, different people, afterwards there is always much food for thought.
The February 2024 clinics proved to be no different.
As always the horses never cease to both amaze me and inspire me with their generosity to give to their handlers.
Generosity of both trust and spirit in what they are being asked to do.
What have I learnt and gained from the February clinics ?
On the drive home I always mull over the the different aspects the day, is there anything that could/should of been done differently - well the answer at the last February clinic was a big YES from me.
There are some things that give me cause for concern that I wont include in my obstacle list, such as hoops, I hate them.
Such simple things I know but they can cause a lot of problems and misunderstandings when they go wrong.
Well now I have another item for the trash bin - the umbrella !
It's another big no no.
An Equine Agility clinic should be a place of learning, the key word being COMMUNICATION.
A chance for the equine/handler partnership to have a deep and meaningful conversation.
It should never be a "spooking busting" clinic, where the equine is frequently taken over his stress threshold.
At the last clinic, for one horse the umbrella was clearly an offender.
His anxiety over seeing it, even on the ground unopened was through the roof.
My thoughts regarding this ;
It is not the right thing to do.
I do not want to send home an exhausted horse and an over stressed owner.
That is counter productive to the ethos of Equine Agility UK
I don't know why I even included it that day as I don't normally.
For me it's a lesson learned.
For the horse, if we had carried on exposing him to it, it wouldn't have been !!!
Sally Golding