07/09/2008 by admin.

Hi there! Bru the Bear here again. I have managed to sneak on here as Mum went out to teach another great lesson for the Wildriders.

Now, you all know how I have little trust for the equine species, but my Mum assures me that there are a great many steady horses in the world. I always took this with a pinch of salt until the other day when I went out on a short trek. Here is a picture of our Lady May with gymnast Micheal Stevenson who had never ridden a real horse before yet oddly assumed they could be used just like the ones you find in the gym! He did a short routine on her culminating in a hand stand and she never even flinched!

I couldn’t help thinking that not only was he lucky that May is a fantastic horse, but also that my Mum didn’t see him doing it!

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07/09/2008 by admin.

Well we finally did it! We finally took our Wildriders and horses to a show. It was the first show for nearly everyone there - including the horses. It was a great experience that we hope to repeat many times next summer with the best out of our Wildriders getting the opportunity to show and groom at Lairg, and Dornoch as well as our own in house competitions in the Easter and Summer holidays.

So how did they do? Excellent! We were so proud of all the Wildriders as some of them haven’t been riding for long at all, and for our girls who entered into the jumping competitions and had only started jumping recently it was an achievement to even be selected to compete in our name.

We were very proud of Chloe who got a second in jumping, a fifth in her ridden class, and a sixth on Bump in the Thelwell class (apparently she would have been placed higher had Bump not been so well behaved!), and Ella did an amazing job with Pollei who came fourth in her in hand class as she had just ripped a shoe off before entering the ring and barely had any tail left after visiting the stallion!

But the star of the show was our Fairy Gem, Gemma Murray, who has been volunteering at Highland Wildrides over the past few months. On her beautiful, big, grey, horse Mr Murphy, she cleaned up with a first in ridden turn out, a first in their ridden, a second in both of her show jumping classes, a third in their in hand class, and got one of the championships (in fact she just narrowly missed the second championship!). On the lead up to the show Gemma had helped us out a great deal by teaching jumping and riding lessons, mentoring the kids in the Wildriders Club in preparation for showing, transporting horses, lending us equipment, and supporting us in the ring - thank you so much Gemma.

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07/09/2008 by admin.

At the beginning of August the adult members of the Wildriders Club got together to go and see Linda and Pat Parelli and their amazing horses do a two day exhibition at the NEC.

It was a truly amazing experience that made us feel like we are really right on track with our training methods. As you are probably aware we are very much in favour of natural horsemanship techniques and all our training methods that we have developed are based in horse psychology. We have learnt a lot in the three years that we have been training horses here and not least from the horses themselves. In fact when we learnt about the Parelli’s seven games we realised that our horses had already taught us the first three!

It was great comfort to hear Pat Parelli say things that we have already begun to see and do ourselves. For instance we have already recognised that lunging is not a great way of exercising or teaching a horse, that ground work is so important, nosebands are generally unnecessary, and if you can’t ride a horse in a snaffle - don’t ride it. Pat Parelli says that it has taken him several decades to get to the stage he is at. We can only thank our lucky stars that he has put all his amazing knowledge into nicely packaged DVD’s so that we can save ourselves that time! While we are sure that we would have got similar results in time, it has meant that by applying ourselves to his programme we have got a globally recognised institution behind us that benefits the horses we have now instead of just the ones we would have in thirty years.

It is our aim over time to qualify several adult Wildriders as Parelli Professionals so keep watching this space……………………

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