Presented by Chloe Phillips-Harris:
What do Reindeer, Racehorses and retired eventers have in common?
Well often not a lot, unless it comes to Chloe Phillips-Harris and her dedication to equine excellence. Her lifelong drive has been to understand the animals we work with better and to ensure we get the best out of them. Chloe has competed to the highest levels in the sport of eventing, ridden and trained in Europe, trained wild horses and ridden close to 9000km on reindeer, camels, yaks and Mongolia’s famous racehorses.
She’s here to share stories and bring the lessons she’s learned from sitting in many different saddles around the world to Melbourne audiences. She believes that our horse’s mind is our greatest asset whether in the competition arena or riding across the toughest landscapes on earth. Her horsemanship philosophy and method of training are built on developing a partnership, understanding the horse and working with them to achieve your dreams.
If you have 5 minutes to understand a fiery racehorse and get it working with you before bolting out onto the great Mongolian steppe, 5 minutes in a pen with a wild horse that’s just been captured or 5 minutes before you step in a start box at a three-day event to ride cross country, what skills are going to help you get the best out of the horse? Not only that but also do what’s best for the horse in these situations.
Chloe Phillips-Harris rides Cor Jet, Puhinui International Horse Trials, Auckland, Saturday, December 09, 2017. Credit: KAMPIC / Kerry Marshall
This is where understanding how a horse’s mind works is key.
Knowing what your horse is feeling by looking at the cues it gives will help you in all the above situations. While humans and the way we communicate may change across cultures and countries, the language of the horse is universal. It’s what makes horse training exciting, you can learn from anywhere things that will help your horse at home.
So look for what your horses trying to tell you. What do its ears say? How does its body feel, is there tension, excitement, or relaxation? Is your horse in a state of mind to think and learn or is it shut down?
Once you understand your horse, you can speak a language with it. When you have a language with your horse, then you start building a partnership and with a true partnership, you can start to follow your dreams. Horses are capable of so much, they are also incredibly intelligent, but too often that intelligence is undermined by bad training methods and a lack of understanding.
A horse can read a cross-country jump in a split second and jump through a tricky combination it’s never seen before. They can navigate incredibly treacherous mountain slopes, ice sheets, deserts and more. Wild horses can learn an entirely new way of life and go on to hold their own in competition arena’s having never seen humans before muster. There is so much evidence that horses are incredibly intelligent. If you want success in the equestrian sports, a beautiful partnership with your horse or wild adventures. Then your best chance of achieving this is to use that intelligence and create an equine partner that wants to do it too. Right? Too often we treat them like their idiots and we get idiotic results, over-controlling training methods take away the horse’s ability to help us and work together.
So let’s get it right. Let’s use our greatest asset in achieiving our dreams, the horse’s own mind to work with us.
First, there must be understanding
Then we must create a language
From language and understanding comes a partnership
With partnership we achieve our dreams.
Lastly how do the reindeer come in to all of this? Well every animal and diversifying your experiences adds understanding to help us with our horses. Camels do great on voice commands, reindeer are inherently gentle but don’t like to be over managed while riding, yaks love following a track. Even within equestrian disciplines, cross training and constantly looking at how we work with horses in different ways makes us better horsemen and women. There is something to be learned everywhere and thats what makes it exciting.
