An Equine Conversation

I have spent many hours thinking about bringing this Special Edition Season of An Equine Conversation to you, and then of course planning & sourcing guests & editing episodes. The more I thought about it, the more and more important and the clearer the WHY for this episode became to me. And it seemed more than what was sensible to fit into the already long Season Trailer, so here we are at Episode...

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  business@m...

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 t...

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...

From the age of about 10-11 years old, it was my dream to have my own children’s riding school. I started instructing at 16 and taught a lot of young people. Initially at riding schools & then at Pony Club where I often taught the youngest members, the more junior groups. In my mid-to-late 20’s, I’d had enough of teaching young people, of dealing with their parents and so I chose to focus on worki...

Today’s episode is a really short & snappy one, dare I say, a mini-sode. Despite being short, it’s an important one, where I’m sharing 2 valuable training tips that I’ve been talking about with my students for more than a decade: farts & unicorns. These are two training tips you can take away immediately and incorporate into your training. A short episode, but one I hope you find really helpful.  ...

It was a few years back now when I first heard about Dr Michaela Hempen’s Masters Research on Crib-biting, which, for those uninitiated, is a stereotypic behaviour that horses can develop. I heard about the research and then had the good fortune to see some of the timeline film of the project thanks to Alexandra Kurland. There is not much now, after so long in the horse world that really captures...

Having young and or green horses is awesome. But also, it can be confusing and overwhelming. We hear conflicting information on young horses – that we shouldn’t start them under saddle too early because their bodies need to develop. But then we also hear that they need a job to do and we often see that in the busy, exploratory behaviour we see from them. For many people it’s a rock and a hard plac...

I am ridiculously excited to have Hannah Branigan as our guest on An Equine Conversation this episode. If you don’t know Hannah’s work, you should make a point of getting to know it. Hannah’s education programs and content in the animal training space with a focus on dogs is next level excellent. Her podcast, Drinking from the Toilet that I’ve mentioned a couple of times in the past on An Equine C...

This episode of An Equine Conversation is quite a different one: In late 2015, Benn & I moved to the country, from the outer suburbs of Melbourne. Yep, we did eat a lot of peaches initially (we knew people with a prolifically producing tree), and have since planted 2 peach trees of our own LOL. For me, moving to the country had been a dream since I can remember (I can’t remember a time I didn’t wa...

Hello lovely listener! We are delighted to be back with Season 3 of An Equine Conversation, a podcast brought to you by Abbey’s Run Equestrian. I’m your host, Sarah Nickels. Just like the previous Seasons, Season 3 includes 8 episodes (plus this trailer). Episodes will drop on a Wednesday morning, Melbourne/Sydney time. We’re dropping our first episode next Wednesday, October 4th. Check out this t...

I’m delighted to welcome our good friend, Julia Inglis back to An Equine Conversation. We first met Julia in Series 1, Episode 8 ‘Julia’s story - a tale to learn from’. If you want to hear Julia’s story, you can jump back and listen to that episode. Julia & I talk so much about training, so we thought we’d start to share some of these conversations with you. In this episode, we start by catching u...

*Please note: this episode does contain profanity*   I first encountered Canadian-based Erin Moore when a friend pointed me to a podcast episode Erin had done last year on running a successful dog training business and I immediately resonated with Erin’s work. I loved what Erin was all about & since that time have been working with Erin on my business, Abbey’s Run Equestrian. Cut to earlier this y...

We want your training with your horse to be fun & enjoyable for your both – in short, we want you to be really successful in your training. When we think about training with our horses & being successful with our training, we often think about the time when we're actively training 1:1 with our horse... but there is a whole bunch of stuff that comes before the active training part that is inextrica...

In early 2022, I started to become a more ardent feminist as I became increasingly exposed to staggering statistics and information around the gender inequality still facing women. This isn’t to say I was ignorant or not a feminist beforehand; it’s more that my focus has become even sharper the more I’ve been exposed to. I’m very grateful to the friends who introduced me to some excellent resource...

In my almost 3 decades of teaching people with horses, there are some things I have been asked about many times. Questions around or support in buying a new horse has been one of these. Horse shopping, much like property shopping, can be an emotional roller-coaster of an experience. Then when you finally land on which equine and have your new partner home, things may not go, in fact often they don...

How many people do you know who’ve had some kind of pain or illness that the human medical professionals have not been able to get to the bottom of or provide relief from? Or where it’s taken some time and robust investigations, often driven by the person or their family to figure out what’s going on? I know quite a few & have experienced this myself, and this is with the diagnostics available to...

We recently released our brand new and long-awaited logo for our business Abbey’s Run Equestrian. The bones of this logo have been rattling around my head for more than 2.5 years and we were finally in a position to bring it to life with the help of Evie Francesca Design Studio.  While the logo itself is physically 2-dimensional, each element holds a purpose or a story about our business, what we...

Late last year I started seeing promotions for the film The Banshees of Inisherin, an Irish film that included a miniature donkey Jenny as one of the stars alongside a cast of several other animals and the human actors including Kerry Condon, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson. I’m not always a fan of animals in films but frankly, Jenny was just gorgeous and as my partner Benn is a fan of miniature...

We are super excited to be back with Season 2 of An Equine Conversation. Check out the trailer for a glimpse of Episode 1 & some fun training action we’ve got going on. As with Season 1, Season 2 episodes will drop on a Wednesday morning, Melbourne/Sydney time. The season consists of 8 episodes (episodes we are so excited about bringing to your ears) plus this trailer. Episode 1 will be released o...

In today’s episode, I’m speaking with Julia Inglis, a very good friend of mine who I met virtually through a mutual friend. Julia lives over in Western Australia, the other side of the country from me, and we’re actually yet to meet in real life. Julia and I are messaging one another and sometimes talking, almost daily about horse training and management. While we had so much we talked about discu...

In the previous podcast episode with Sara Jackson, and in the next episode with Julia Inglis, you’ll hear mention of ‘positive reinforcement’ as a training approach. We’ve mentioned it ourselves too in talking about our Start Your Engines course+workshop. I suspect that some of you listening will be well familiar with training using positive reinforcement, but there are likely others listening who...

In this episode, I’m speaking with Sara Jackson who is across the other side of the Country from me, over in Western Australia. For those unfamiliar with Australia, that’s a 4-hour flight, plus the drive at each end to the airport, which at my end is over 3 hours. We’re speaking about Sara's her own, quite colourful journey with horses and how this has brought her to sharing with other people abou...

It is so easy to fall into the trap of assuming that because it says horse on the label, or comes from a saddlery, or produce store, that your horse will know what to do with, whatever the thing is. Especially if you believe that your horse had some life experience before it came to be with you. This episode could be a super short one, where I just tell you that your horse DID NOT get the memo tha...

In this week’s episode, I chat with Sharon Merritt from Victoria’s Country Fire Authority, better known here as the CFA, on preparing for bushfire (or you might know it as wildfire events) when we own horses. This is something we feel strongly about having had friends and family impacted in some of the more recent major fire events in our Country and having had fire come close to where our horses...