I survived!!!  I was so far out of my comfort zone, but what an honour to be asked to speak at the Horse of the Year Show!  So many people have been asking how it went, thank you for your interest!  I’m not sure I’m the best person to answer that question, but from what I could see, no one left part way through the talk, and the people that were drifting by and stopped to listen for a minute seemed to sit down and stay for the rest, so I reckon that’s a good benchmark to go by :-)

I talked about why it’s so important to recognise pain behaviours in our horses in order to avoid punishment based training methods.  I described some of the practical exercises from Brain Pain or Training that we can use with our own horses on a regular basis to check their level of comfort (there wasn’t time to describe them all), and I talked about the recent research from Sue Dyson and the Animal Health Trust looking at how to recognise pain in the ridden horse through facial expression and behaviour.  Looking more deeply into the research has left me even more fascinated, and I’m really looking forward to reading more studies in depth over the coming months and sharing that knowledge through Patreon (www.patreon.com/thehorsephysio).

So where do I go from here? I’m not sure yet, but I know I’m looking forward to the journey, and I hope you’ll come along with me :-)

Images copyright Simon Palmer, cheetahworld.com