Rider fitness and confidence
Breathing all wrong, and the other habits horses forgive
Ciara Glaisher treats horses and their riders as one system. This week: the breathing habit most of us picked up at school, and what it does in the saddle.
Theresa
Theresa is the producer and founder of Curious Equestrian.
Horse behaviour and psychology
Horse sleep: what the research shows, and where it runs out.
The strongest signal in the research is a horse nobody has watched lie down. Four papers on what that means, and the number everyone quotes that has no source.
Horse training without force
I learned to ride before I learned anything about horses
She asks the question most of us never think to ask: if the only reward on offer is the removal of something annoying, where is the horse's reason to actually enjoy the work?
Horse welfare and the industry
Treated like kings, when all they want is to be horses
The deaths, she says, are the easiest thing to see and, oddly, among the easier things to fix; fewer runners, lower fences, a better start. What is harder, and far more common, is the ordinary life of a racehorse when no camera is pointed at it.
Horse welfare and the industry
We don't have a throwaway problem, do we?
This week Anna sat down with Theresa Demarest and Katherine Gregory to talk about Throw Away Horses, a new documentary on Amazon Prime and on Vimeo worldwide. Theresa is the filmmaker (she made Keiko: The Untold Story before this); Katherine runs Colorado Horse Rescue, a roughly two-million-dollar-a-
Horse welfare and the industry
13 owners and not one came forward
One arrived with a microchip logging 13 registered owners. Billy contacted every single one. Not one was interested.
Horse welfare and the industry
Free lessons, funded by followers: is this what saves British riding schools?
What Chloe has built is not a charity. It is a third economic model. The content funds the sessions; the sessions generate more content; the community grows and the riding school fills with paying clients who found her through the algorithm.
Forage, tracks and daily care
The supplier was almost embarrassed to charge what he had to
The hay in your horse's net tonight may have crossed three borders. Someone lost sleep making sure it got here.
Horse behaviour and psychology
The wrong question we ask about horse-human partnership
Communication in this tradition is less about training methods that produce compliance and more about building the kind of trust and mutual understanding where the horse can actually choose to participate.
Horse health, pain and bodywork
What your horse's "ticklishness" is actually telling you
The conversation covers horse massage as a practical tool for owners, not just professionals. Three checks you can do every week (grooming reactions, carrot stretches in both directions, a tight circle on both reins) that build up a picture of what's normal, so you notice when something changes.
Horse health, pain and bodywork
She's helped horses in 26 countries with tape
The Woman Rewriting Equine Rehabilitation 30 Years, 26 Countries, & Rolls of Tape.
Horse behaviour and psychology
Wild horse behaviour: what 20 years of research reveals about domestic horses.
When Bonny Mealand first started working with wild horses, everything she thought she knew fell apart. Anna Louise asked how that felt. Bonny paused. "It was devastating, actually." She'd grown up like most of us, believing horses existed for our purposes. To ride, to compete, to