28/10/2008 by admin.

We at Highland Wildrides would like to offer you a fantastic opportunity to introduce your pupils to our horses with an introductory half price offer on our 1hr treks. We have a unique riding centre that offers world class trekking on the rare Scottish native breeds, and it has been brought to our attention that we may be able to assist you with outdoor learning as part of the new curriculum for excellence.

Horse riding provides children with a huge range of benefits including;

It provides exercise outdoors.

It teaches children about responsibility

It teaches children about commitment

It teaches children to focus on tasks

It tones poorly developed muscles and improves coordination

It builds confidence

It teaches group lessons about team work and compassion for others

It makes children aware of rural matters

As we specialise in Scottish natives we are also able to give a historical and cultural slant to the outdoor learning. We can inform your pupils of the origins of each of the breeds and the areas they come from whilst walking them through a landscape that is full of historical monuments from as far back as 3000BC!

In addition to this offer we are also happy to take your pupils on placements for work experience and rural skills. We are fully licensed by the Highland Council and we also carry a high level of liability insurance cover to enable us to cater for groups of children.

Our normal price for an hours trek is £20 and we give a 10% discount to groups of 5 or more. We would like to enable you to sample our trekking by offering you a discount of 50% on the first trek you book with us so that you can see whether or not this is the sort of outdoor learning your pupils would enjoy. All schools that participate in this offer will receive a voucher for an hours trek for two people to be used as a prise or gift for fundraising for your school.

If you would like more details then please call us on 01863 766 771 or take a look at our fantastic new website www.highlandwildrides.co.uk

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28/10/2008 by admin.

A few of you have been asking what our plans for this winter are and I can confirm that we are staying open. The way that we plan to manage riding around the weather is to give the kids pony care lessons on the days that it is too wet to ride. At least 50% of being “horsey” is on the ground, and we don’t want the kids to lose interest over winter and find themselves back at the beginning with riding in the spring. The other part that is beneficial to parents is that once the kids realise how tough it is to care for a horse every day they usually think twice about asking for one of their own!

Pony care lessons are half the price of a riding lesson.

However, there will still be days when it is just too rotten for small kids to be out at all or weather which is too dangerous to be on the yard such as high winds when the horses become spooky. On days like these we will post a cancellation on our website www.highlandwildrides.co.uk on the events calendar under the relevant date. We would also be able to send you an email if you can provide us with your email address. This would also be very handy to keep you all up to date on upcoming events such as the Halloween parade and the open day once the new barn is built.

We are hoping that the new barn will be fully functional this side of Christmas and will provide the kids with an area that is completely covered to enjoy pony care and indoor activities such as tack cleaning competitions, quizzes and talks. It will house a petting zoo as well as the horses, the feed, the tack and a reception.

Work on the barn begins this week and in order to make it as speedy as possible we will be closed from Friday 14^th November until Tuesday 25^th of November.

So we hope to see you all soon and look forward to playing more mounted games!

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28/10/2008 by admin.

We have been dancing round here like kids before Christmas for weeks now, eagerly awaiting the arrival of diggers, and cement mixers, men in yellow jackets, and lots of commotion as we start to build our long awaited American Barn and new yard! The excitement has been building and now we have woken up on our “Christmas Morning” to find it’s a white one!

It has snowed all night long, and is still snowing now at almost mid day so the first fall of winter has not melted away, but is now covering the flat packed barn that has sat in the car park for 3 whole years!

Now, I very much doubt that a little snow is going to make any difference to an 18 tonne track machine, but it is impeding its progress and excitement is giving away to frustration - frustration that it has not arrived yet, and frustration that the constant snow showers are going to make it difficult to view the work of the contractors across the field from the old yard!

Of course the equine members of staff are completely oblivious to our intentions, and whilst they stand miserably in mud and the snow sits on their rugs they have no idea that we are planning to make them a cosy new dwelling complete with winter feeding corral so that they need never feel a drop of rain or flake of snow again. This is our foal, Lottie’s, first ever snow. She seems a little interested but is safely tucked up in our current barn to prevent her charging around and hurting herself and is mainly ignoring it in favour of her haylage.

However, there is one type of Wildride creature that can’t ignore the snow, and that is of course, the huskies. They are so excited by the snow that they are making the barn worshippers look unmoved! Currently Nuke and Kramer are out in the pen charging around, wrestling, rolling, and cavorting in it. The fact that Nuke has a completely nude belly after recently being spayed seems to mean nothing to her. However, we shall take her inside and warm her up with cuddles on the sofa afterwards!

The sled dogs have started their training a little late this year as we have had such a busy October holiday, and September was very warm and humid making it difficult to get them out in case they overheated which is more likely at the start of training as they are fairly unfit. Our volunteer kennel maid, Trini, has been starting them off with their Gee/Haw training (teaching them their left [Haw] from their right [Gee]) which is the first stage in our fittening and training program. She is hoping to race a team in junior events for us this year so she has been doing the training mainly unaided to ensure the dogs will take direction from her, and has done extremely well as they seem to really have got the idea pretty quickly. Most of them are just in need of a refresher, but some of our young dogs are learning for the first time.

Initially this is done on the lead and we take them into the riding school and walk them round a prepared obstacle course consisting of shapes and junctions that can be reversed to enable us to use both commands. The course is different each time we use it so that they never become conditioned to a route and have to really use their brains to decipher what the commands mean.

Eventually we move onto doing this out on a trail doing “Canicross” which is basically a jog with a dog. For this we put the dogs in harness and onto very long lines that are attached to abseiling harnesses worn by the handlers. The handlers jog (fairly effortlessly) behind the dogs who pull them. This is a great way to get mushers and dogs fit enough to pull a rig or sled before we them move onto the next stage which is teaming them up, and finally getting them fast by running them from the front of our dune buggy. We use abseiling harnesses rather than specially designed waist belts as a couple of our dogs are incredibly strong and we need to be able to really sit into the harnesses with all our weight if we need to stop them. There is no way we could hold onto them on a plain lead, and we have had problems with shoulder injuries in handlers who have tried to do this in the past. Canicross is quick with it being possible to do 3 minute miles, and jogging without a sled dog will always seem boring after you try it !

Are you interested in more information about training sled dogs? Then register on here and post a question or leave a comment.

WE ARE NOW TAKING BOOKINGS FOR NEXT YEARS SLED DOG TRAINING TRIPS.

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