S3 E8: An Irish start & another EMS pony - with Dorothy Heffernan

11/21/23 • 89 min

Here we are at our final episode for Season 3 of An Equine Conversation. The months & months of recording & editing have all finally finished & you now have the whole season to listen to & what an epic season it has been too.

Stay tuned at the end of the conversation for some announcements.

I’m delighted to bring you this final episode with the 4th inspirational women in the horse world I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with this season.

This is yet another conversation I’ve been so looking forward to having and to sharing with you. Dr Dorothy Heffernan is based in Scotland, my favourite place in the world besides where I am in Victoria, Australia, but grew up in Ireland. I mention in the conversation, an Irish documentary that was on TV when I was a child about horses in Ireland and so I always wondered what it would have been like growing up horsie in Ireland. You’ll never believe it, but someone’s put that 53 minute and a bit documentary, which must have been made in the 1980’s or even 70’s onto YouTube. I almost fell off my chair when I thought to look and found it.

I digress...

Dorothy first came on my radar a number of years ago with her insightful responses to questions on some of the equine behaviour & positive reinforcement Facebook groups & it seemed Dorothy liked mine too & we connected over a like-minded approach.

Since then I’ve been following Dorothy’s journey with both her training work with humans & horses in Scotland, and with her own little herd of horses. I knew Dorothy grew up in Ireland and I wanted to hear what that was like & I love Scotland so am always happy to speak with anyone there.

I know some of you lovely listeners had really resonated with & appreciated hearing Julia Inglis story with her EMS horse and you wanted more information around EMS – a growing challenge for many horse owners. Dorothy has an EMS pony Rio – whose story I wanted to share with you as well, so we delve into the trials and tribulations of managing an EMS pony in Scotland.

It was such a fun conversation with Dorothy who is a great story-teller. Even listening back to edit the episode, I laughed and I almost shed tears at different points. I hope you enjoy listening as much as Dorothy & I enjoyed recording this for you.

Dorothy Heffernan:

Dorothy Heffernan, PhD was born and raised in Dublin in the Republic of Ireland, where she was a horse and pony mad child. She moved to Scotland to study psychology and took her love of all things equid with her.

After graduating with a PhD from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, she chose to specialize in equine behavior and has been working as an equine behavior consultant for 17 years, helping people solve behavior challenges with their horses, ponies, donkeys and mules. In 2021, she joined with three other force-free equid trainers to launch Positive Equine Training Scotland, offering support and training to people in Scotland who want to learn about new gentle and compassionate ways of working with their equid friends. Getting to meet and work with a variety of equids, big, small, long and short eared has been Dorothy’s dream all her life, and now she’s living that dream.

As well as teaching and helping with equid behaviour issues, Dorothy supervises research projects for the University of Edinburgh courses in Equine Science and Animal Behaviour & Welfare. She has her own three lovely equid friends who take up either far too much (or not nearly enough) of her time, all trained using force free positive reinforcement methods.

In this episode we discuss:

1:24 - episode introduction

4:15 - introducing Dr Dorothy Heffernan

4:47 - Scotland: the Scottish summer, loving Scotland & accents/dilects

14:09 - growing up horse-mad in the suburbs of Dublin

16.29 - riding lessons in the middle of Dublin city

18:36 - making the most of horsie extended family

19.55 - eventually Dad bought the horse - perseverance pays off

23:60 - enter Rio

28.11 - enter Mal

30.18 - enter Jackson

25.41 - how studying & teaching in Psychology has informed a change in horse keeping & training

43.56 - Rio’s EMS: the background

52.10 - the laminitis diagnosis, the management & the recovery

54.16 - round 2

56:52 - Rio’s current status: ditching the fat pads & ‘the knife edge’

57.59 - Dorothy’s insights: forage/feed importance, what exercise does

59:28 - a positively trained, EMS pony, the need for exercise & how that was managed

1:00:53 - the positive ripple effects of the exercise training

1:03:16 - Rio’s living set-up & management now - balancing behavioural & health needs

1:05:38 - exercising ‘relatively hard’ - what is hard enough to have a positive impact

1:06:52 - the broad...

Stay tuned at the end of the conversation for some announcements.

I’m delighted to bring you this final episode with the 4th inspirational women in the horse world I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with this season.

I digress...

Dorothy Heffernan:

In this episode we discuss:

1:24 - episode introduction

4:15 - introducing Dr Dorothy Heffernan

4:47 - Scotland: the Scottish summer, loving Scotland & accents/dilects

14:09 - growing up horse-mad in the suburbs of Dublin

16.29 - riding lessons in the middle of Dublin city

18:36 - making the most of horsie extended family

19.55 - eventually Dad bought the horse - perseverance pays off

23:60 - enter Rio

28.11 - enter Mal

30.18 - enter Jackson

25.41 - how studying & teaching in Psychology has informed a change in horse keeping & training

43.56 - Rio’s EMS: the background

52.10 - the laminitis diagnosis, the management & the recovery

54.16 - round 2

56:52 - Rio’s current status: ditching the fat pads & ‘the knife edge’

57.59 - Dorothy’s insights: forage/feed importance, what exercise does

59:28 - a positively trained, EMS pony, the need for exercise & how that was managed

1:00:53 - the positive ripple effects of the exercise training

1:03:16 - Rio’s living set-up & management now - balancing behavioural & health needs

1:05:38 - exercising ‘relatively hard’ - what is hard enough to have a positive impact

1:06:52 - the broad...

Previous Episode

S3 E7: The wine cellar

Let me invite you today, to come for a little journey into the wine cellar with me, which is kind of ironic, given I don’t drink alcohol, but hey, I can still appreciate the amazingness that is a wine cellar... so come on this little journey with me.

Why are we going to the wine cellar? Well, for very, very good reason:

Because, we have a tendency to start training our horses on the ground floor or somewhere above it, so, in the middle instead of at the beginning, instead of starting down in the gloriousness that is the wine cellar.

I think we do this for a variety of very legitimate reasons, but it often leads us into a pickle in lots of ways with training our horses where we get ourselves stuck or facing problems.

I hear some of you cry here, ‘but but but, I am not a horse trainer, I am an owner and I work with a trainer so this episode can’t be for me’... and I’m here to tell you that anyone who works with or cares for any animal, anywhere is a trainer – regardless of whether we’re conscious of it or not. So yep, if you care for a horse or any other animal, you are a trainer & this episode, this visit to the wine cellar is for you. As if you don’t want to go to the wine cellar anyway!?

In today’s episode I’m going to speak to the training that comes before the training. Because that piece is inextricably connected to just how successful any training, which I say in inverted commas, is.

So let’s head down the stairs into the cool of the wine cellar together and get started.

In this episode we discuss:

1:22 - episode introduction

3:10 - we so often miss the (training) things that come before & start training somewhere in the middle instead of at the start (or in the wine cellar)

5:37 - there’s a whole lot of training that doesn’t seem like ‘training’ but IS training and has a direct impact on our ‘training’

7:37 - the things that come before the wine cellar - the ‘site preparation’

8:46 - problems in training: symptoms versus causes

9:58 - what’s falls into the category of training that doesn’t seem like training but is training, for you

13:19 - setting up the classroom for student success

14:19 - wine cellar foundations are not something most of us were taught

16:49 - the role that peer pressure (direct or in-direct) plays

19:34 - it’s not rocket science, but we mostly miss them and/or need permission to go there

20:23 - an activity you can do that doesn’t seem like training but absolutely is training

23:30 - another activity to think about how you’d approach in your circumstances

25:54 - episode recap

30.22 - episode wrap-up & what’s on next week

Links mentioned this episode:

Thank you to Matthew Bliss for podcast production & consultation. You can find out more about podcast support on offer via: https://www.mbpod.com/

Next Episode

S4: Trailer

Hello lovely listener!
I am so excited to be back & bringing you this, our first Special Edition Season of An Equine Conversation.

Just like previous Seasons of the podcast, Season 4 includes 8 episodes, the first of which will drop next Wednesday.

Thank you to Matthew Bliss for podcast production and consultation. If you'd like him to help with your podcast, get in touch by email at [email protected]