2026
This course is being created to provide practical eyes- and hands-on horses training for which there is a rider complaint of decline in a horse’s performance, changes in behavior, or a failure to progress in training without any obvious causes. We will discuss how to understand a rider’s complaint and what further investigation should be carried out. For example, how do you deal with a horse in which the rider’s complaint is that the horse will not canter on the left rein, but you cannot see any lameness? Or the horse that used to jump well but has started to episodically refuse jumps? Or a horse that episodically explodes and the rider has now become fearful about riding? Further, the tools to address these problems will be taught and demonstrated by instructors with complementary skills and experience to provide approaches to these and other challenging scenarios, to enhance your ability to recognize changes in movement patterns and behavior that may reflect pain.
There will not be lectures on the types of pain, their causes, specific regions and lesions. Participants will be advised to view the recording packages 1, 2, 3 and 4 as well as attending the webinars on October 27, November 5 and 17 described in Digital Equine Poor Performance: Is it pain related? to be up to date for the course.
- Examples of changes in movement patterns that are not lameness in the historic conventional sense but are adaptations in gait in the face of pain.
- How to systematically evaluate ridden horses.
- How to differentiate between pain as the cause for a behavior change and ‘difficult horses’. When is retraining the first line of approach?
- How to use integrative medicine practices and tools to assess pain.
- Assessing Pain in Horses through Video Analysis.
- Wet labs on
1) applying the ridden horse pain ethogram;
2) applying integrative medicine practices and tools;
3) applying video-based assessment of pain in horses.
More information will be displayed when it is available.