Training a horse is a challenging but necessary part of equine ownership. If you don’t train your horse, it will become unruly and hard to manage as it reaches adulthood. Independently of which horse breed you own, maybe it’s a Shetland pony or maybe an Arabian horse, training it will take time, but the rewards are there if you can pull it off.

Set Goals

Before you start training your horse, it’s important to know your main objective. Some people just want to ride their horses around a field; some want to take their horses onto the road, and some want to take their horses around the country in trailers. Whatever goal you have, make sure you take it step-by-step and don’t rush things. If you want to teach your horse to get into the trailer, you have to get it used to the trailer first but if what you want is to ride your horse, it would be best to get it used to having a saddle on first.

Trust

Having your horse’s trust is one of the most important aspects of training. If your horse doesn’t trust you, it won’t listen to you, and you’ll waste hours training it when it’s in a state that won’t accept any training. You need to build that trust over time by doing simple things like grooming it, spending time with it, walking it, etc. Once you’ve built up that trust, only then can you begin training it.

Read more: 5 Tips to Help You Train Your Horse

by Jackie Bellamy-Zions

Heaves is known as a disease that can leave a horse struggling to breathe, ending athletic careers and even rendering a pleasure horse unsuitable for riding. Commonly known today as equine asthma, it’s an irreversible disease brought on by repeated exposure to dust and moulds. Ontario Veterinary College researcher, Doctor Bienzle has a long history of primary and collaborative work studying asthma in horses. Her most recent contributions include working with a group of researchers in Slovenia, investigating stem cells as a potential treatment option.

Bienzle explains the usual causes of heaves are long term exposure to dusty or mouldy hay, bedding, dusty environments and sometimes even grass in hot humid climates that provide the right conditions for mould to thrive. “Horses get sensitized to these components in the inhaled air and with time, they develop airway inflammation and that begins to manifest with occasional coughing or runny nose.”

With continued exposure to the same particulates, the condition worsens, and the coughing becomes more continuous. The nose may be running and then there is thickening of the bronchial wall in the lung. There is extra smooth muscle being laid down and it becomes hard for the horse to exhale against mucus and inflammatory cells in the lumen of the airway.

In the later stages of disease, horses can develop a ‘heaves line’ (hypertrophic abdominal muscles are recruited to assist with exhaling air). By the time equine asthma is diagnosed, it has usually been present for a few years, if not several. Treatment of the symptoms includes immunosuppression, but the disease cannot be reversed.

Read more: Stem Cells Under Investigation as a Possible Future Treatment for Equine Asthma