Books with Spirit – Joyfulness between horses and people

We have been told that horses are bad for the Australian environment – to the extent that riding horses is forbidden in many parks in Australia.

Of course, there’s no doubt that hard footed animals are responsible for a large part of the degradation of the land here in Australia.

Well, the good news is, that horses and cattle can also play a significant part in saving the environment.  Well-managed native pasture sequesters more carbon than trees do.  And sequestering carbon is what governments to environmentalists are trying to do at the moment.

…Graeme Hand, agricultural scientist and CEO of STIPA, the native grass company, is going to spend a day telling us how we can regenerate native pasture using horses to do it… 

This one day course is taking place here at Tanjil South on the 9^th October.  Graeme has very generously given us the day at a fixed rate plus $20 each for the notes, which will mean that the cost of the day, divided up amongst ourselves will come in under $100 each..  The more people that come, the less the cost.

I’ve had a taste of what Graeme has to offer us and I’m very excited to be learning more.  He’s a great speaker, interesting and had me on the edge of my seat making sure that I didn’t miss a thing.  Tell every horse person you know about this one!

Phone me, Jenny on 03 5160 1481 to book.  Bring something for lunch to share.

Fear to varying degrees is the most common of all the emotions that we experience around our horse, with anger and frustration hot on its heels. 

Oh, hang on a minute… Did you think that it was only you who had times where you lack confidence with your horse?   Did you think that it was only you who had trouble with your nerve?  Did you think that you were out there on your lonesome feeling like that? 

Heck no!   I’m happy (or not happy really) to tell you that whether they talk about it or not, most people commonly experience either fear, anger or frustration (or even all of them at once) with their horse.

And that does not one scrap take away from the fact that we mostly love ‘em to bits.

 Click here to read about what changed the way that I experienced fear around my horse.

My granddaughter Bree’s pony, Blondie (our Cremello miniature) is one of those horses who stops when she’s afraid.  I realised some time ago that that was what makes her a perfect kid’s first pony.  When Blondie gets afraid, she stops.  When she’s terrified, she freezes.  So the chances of Bree getting hurt if her pony gets a fright are greatly reduced.

Click here to read on about how we stuff that up with way too many of these wonderful beginner’s horses, bringing fear to our horse and nervousness to ourselves.

We can feel quite powerless to change the things that happen on our planet, but I’m telling you that every time we open up our wallets at the supermarket, we can change the world, one baby step at a time and this is a very powerful way to be changing the world.

This is way outside of what I normally write about on this blog, but for some reason I am drawn this morning to write on this subject.  Buy free range.  It’s simple.  Everytime you buy any meat or eggs, then buy free range and nothing else is OK. 

Make a commitment to not eat suffering.  Make a personal commitment now, today,  to give x number of chickens, pigs, cows and sheep a life by not eating their suffering.  Keep these animals out of cages, out of feed lots and give them a life.

That’s a lot of animals in a year to rescue. If you ate nothing but chicken, the average family, voting with their wallet would rescue about 400 chickens per year and give them a life.

That’s powerful…