NL Equestrian - Coaching & Horsemanship

03/09/2025

Coaching, schooling and behavioural consulting session availability remaining during September:

Tues 16th 9am, 5.30pm
Wed 17th 4pm, 5.30pm
Fri 18th 2.30pm
Sat 20th 3pm
Tues 23rd 9am, 5.30pm
Wed 24th, 4pm, 5.30pm.

35 years experience, Cert.Ed FE Teaching, HNC Animal Behaviour & Welfare, BHS Stg2, Emergency First Aider L3, Fully Insured.

28/08/2025

Bubbalicious trying out her new footwear! I am avoiding putting shoes on her lovely feet at all cost…nails cause cracks and lost shoes in my experience owning Thoroughbreds. She has sensitive soles however, so Flex Hoof boots it is! She’ll have black gaiters instead of pink when she goes out in public 🤣

31/07/2025

To anyone thinking about ditching the noseband for improved equine welfare, read this peer reviewed article which shows that a tighter noseband reduces stride length!

The FEI have a noseband gauge ruling this year to stop over tightening but wouldn’t it be nice if we could compete in all disciplines without them?

https://askanimalweb.com/new-study-links-tight-nosebands-to-reduced-stride-length-and-potential-facial-damage-in-horses-3/?fbclid=IwQ0xDSwL3_lFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHmyWfuHw7gbJ5yp0b3KXHjdbR9zJl1uXvoXTUtHURO7tJ4-MPEeYDW_I4svT_aem_rYmaTwz32O0NvrkqHiGY9g

A new scientific study co-authored by Animalweb’s own Dr David Marlin in conjuction with Anglia Ruskin University students Emily Hopkins and Stacie Whitrod and ARU Writtle Associate Professor of Animal Biomechanics and Sports Medicine and School Research Lead Dr Roberta Blake, has found that tight...

30/07/2025

Drama on social media is the flavour of the month and it’s actually the flavour of every month. Bashing R+ training and trainers is particularly popular.

But I wanted to point something out in case you didn’t realise. There’s a lot of pages out there who monetise their content and the best way to get likes, comments and shares, is through drama and outrage.

So the next time you like or put an angry face or comment or share a post, think about that for a moment and think about whether they are helping in someway, or educating in someway, or just feeding off the frenzy?

Just like in my positive reinforcement training, I teach my horse what to do, rather than focus on what they may be doing that I don’t like. I think this is an important lesson we can take away in life in general.

Perhaps share the positives and what is possible and what people could be doing instead, rather than focusing on the negatives and getting outraged and angry.

Certainly, getting angry has its place to motivate behaviour change, but if it’s going nowhere and someone is simply making money out of it, it’s not productive anger.

I have a lot of hope for the future and I love to share all the happiness and enjoyment and pleasure that not only I get, but my equines get from training the way I do.

Can we put out more positives than negatives, in the hopes of promoting a better way? 🧡

30/07/2025

It’s easy to go back to hitting horses.
Not because it’s right, but because it’s ingrained.
It’s easy to say “don’t do that” instead of “try this instead.”
It’s easy to be reactive.
Especially after years of responding that way.

It’s easy to change what you believe and still find yourself slipping back into the habits of old mistakes.
No one talks about the guilt that follows. The weight of knowing better yet feeling yourself repeat what you swore you’d leave behind.

But the work is in the pause. In managing your frustration.
In taking that moment to recognize the patterns and how deep the indoctrination can run.

Just pause. Take a breath. Acknowledge the emotion you’re feeling in that moment and choose a better direction.

13/07/2025

Lovely to receive recommendations from
clients and seeing them go on to enjoy their horses. Thank you Lisa 😌

12/07/2025

Finally able to do a bit of schooling on my own ex race horse Bubbalicious. With Uni and work commitments, my time retraining her has been a bit stop start. Now 1 year together and she feels more like a riding horse than a racehorse and is starting to balance in canter with a soft contact. Our biggest challenge is keeping her relaxed and I therefore have lots of breaks, always keep quiet when she isn’t and give her plenty of praise and reward. We finish with a cool off mini hack around our field tracks afterwards where she can have a good stretch.

To most, this video looks ordinary even boring, however today’s little session means a huge amount. Behind the scenes it’s taken months to get her to stand on the yard on her own, be tacked up without freaking out, stand at the mounting block and trotting without the expectation, this means gallop! Groundwork has been the biggest part of retraining and months of hacking before schooling commenced.

She currently wears a breastplate as I’ve face planted twice after a slight saddle skip from the extra moves she likes to throw at me every now and again 🤦‍♀️, but no breastplate or bit are my future goals with her., she really is not keen on anything in her mouth.

It’s hard to comprehend what she’s been through at such a young age (now 6) however, positive reinforcement has, together with taking lots and lots of time, been our most successful technique in retraining her. In addition, rewarding the good and ignoring the not so good has helped her confidence and our bond together to grow. She’s not to retrain and sell on, she’s a lifetime horse and replaces my last ex-racer I owned until the age of 28 😌

10/07/2025

07/07/2025

Coaching, behavioural consulting, retraining or schooling your horse.
July availability:

🐴 Friday 18th-10am, 11.15
🐴 Sat 19th-10am, 11.15,
12.30, 1.45, 3.30
🐴 Thur 24th 12, 1.15, 2,30
🐴 Friday 25th 10am, 11.15,
12.30, 1.45, 3.30

Please message/WhatsApp for a chat or to book 🙂

07/07/2025

Horses are not brats, or being naughty, they are communicating in the only way they know how. If it’s not a communication issue, as the animal is fearful or doesn’t understand, you can pretty much guarantee that’s it’s linked to pain. Sue Dyson has done a number of studies on this over the years and more recently to help identify ridden horse problems. However, signs of pain could be non musculoskeletal and appear in the feet or nerve damage for instance and not show up as lameness. We’ve all heard the story of the dangerous horse which was put to sleep to later find out he has a tooth growing inside his cheek or a brain tumour. Horses are communicating with us, if we are going to become a better equestrian world, we need to start listening and giving horse the benefit of doubt.

It’s incredibly alarming to see the number of horse people who want to insist that behavioural problems are not caused by pain, even in the case of horses they’ve never handled.

This attitude leads to horses being worked through pain or, worse, punished for their reaction to pain because people refuse to consider the idea that there could be a physical problem.

I’m seeing this in droves on the short I posted or my work with Magic, a very reactive OTTB gelding.

Despite the fact that the short shows a massive change in behaviour, many people are still insisting things like the following:

“He’s not in pain, he’s just a brat.”

“He needs an attitude adjustment”

“That is a disrespectful horse”

“That horse belongs in a dog food can.”

“Sore feet don’t cause rearing.”

People are making these assessments from a 75 second video despite the fact that the video states pain was a factor.

All of this on a video that shows substantial behavioural change, too.

Imagine how these people look at horses in their day-to-day life that they haven’t seen the “after” of.

It does horses such a disservice to view all unwanted behaviour through the lens of the horse being disrespectful.

It’s also incredibly dismissive to assume that pain isn’t a factor when people involved with the horse have done diagnostic processes to determine underlying pain and work to resolve it.

It becomes pretty clear how much pain influences behaviour when you start to make changes that result in substantial behavioural change, as what happened when we started to address his hoof pain.

If anything, a lot MORE horses are reacting to underlying pain that is then blamed as a training issue — not less.

Horses are very stoic animals and will hide discomfort where they can because the lame horse is the one that gets eaten by predators.

Chronic pain can create reactivity and hyper vigilance that can manifest in a number of different ways.

It saddens me to see how many people in a community that claims to love horses are willing to give the horse the benefit of the doubt and look deeper.

The people in the comments section of that short responding with anger and animosity towards the horse or a dismissiveness to an informed perspective on what led to his behaviour speak for a greater issue within the horse world.

People think that training with a behavioural science informed lens is “reading too far into horse behaviour” because so many of us have been trained to view horse behaviour through a very limited and shallow lens.

Horses deserve better.

Times are changing.

This information is becoming more and more accessible.

This makes it far less justifiable for people to continue burying their heads in the sand and going out of their way to directly or indirectly blame the horse.

The studies that have been conducted on horse pain, if anything, show that lameness and underlying pain are a rampant issue in the horse world. Even with horses who are perceived as sound.

This begs the question:

“Why are people so averse to considering that pain and discomfort can create the behavioural problems they face?”

Lastly, what does giving the horse the benefit of the doubt take away from you?

06/07/2025

Makes you really think.. if you feel a shoe size box is unsuitable space for a hamster, why are we doing this to intelligent, social equines?

THE HAMSTER TEST 🐹 What a horse's stable size really means....

The British Horse Society recommends 12ft x 12ft (3.65m x 3.65m) minimum recommendation for an average horse. They also recommend larger sizes (e.g., 12ft x 14ft) for horses over 17 hands (hh) and smaller sizes for ponies.

It sounds reasonable, right?
But let's put that into perspective.
A hamster, averaging just 10cm (about 4 inches) in length, is recommended to have a spacious cage of 900 square inches with 6-8 inches of bedding allowing it to run, burrow, and play, reflecting its natural behaviours!

Now, let's consider our average horse with a total body length (nose to tail) of 9 feet (108 inches). If we apply a similar ratio of space to body length squared as that well-cared-for hamster, what would our horse truly need?

An average 9-foot horse, given the same proportional space as that hamster, would require a staggering 1,046,000 square inches of "stable" space!

To visualise that scale, it's equivalent to a square enclosure roughly 32.3 meters by 32.3 meters (or about 106ft x 106ft) which is only slightly smaller than an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

Compare that to the standard 12ft x 12ft stable (approx. 144 sq ft or 13.4 sq m). The disparity is immense. While horses aren't hamsters, this striking comparison highlights how incredibly minimal a 12x12 stable truly is for an animal of their size, natural instincts, and fundamental need for movement.

Equines are intelligent, social animals designed to roam vast distances. Confining them to such small spaces, even for part of the day, can severely impact their well-being, potentially leading to...
😓 Boredom, frustration, and stress
The development of stereotypic behaviours (like weaving or crib-biting)
😓Joint and muscle issues from lack of movement
😓 Respiratory problems due to restricted air circulation
😓 Reduced opportunities for social interaction

As responsible carers we must advocate for more appropriate housing solutions.

Let's rethink what "adequate" space truly means for our horses. They deserve more than just enough room to stand up and lie down. They deserve space that genuinely supports their physical health, mental well-being, and innate desire to move. The answer may lie in natural boarding alternatives like track systems and Paddock Paradise. These offer the opportunity to create more species appropriate environments that encourage continuous movement with mental stimulation, and social interaction, promoting healthier and relaxed equine partners.

What are your thoughts on stable sizes and equine welfare? Share in the comments! 👇