Equine Connection & Equine Guelph Part 1
Kari Fulmek is the Master Instructor & Senior Facilitator/Founder of Equine Connection - Academy of Equine Assisted Learning. Gayle Ecker is Director of Equine Guelph.
Well, top of the day to you today, we are beyond excited with our special guest speaker today and of course, collaborator in what? You'll find out very, very soon. That's right, we are pumped about this because we think it's a pretty good giveaway you guys are getting today. Just to find out a little bit more about what? Horses! Of course, because that's what we do around here.
Be kind people, spread it out there like glitter, whatever you do, spread some kindness today because we always like to keep that piece so that we have the opportunity to change somebody's life for the better.
But the best part of our certification at the Equine Connection is we're all about the number one thing which is the welfare of the horse. Not just health. It is the entire component of the horse, understanding their language, their world, and their culture. So the more that we can all gain in the world and the knowledge of the horse, we are so much better as horse people, because remember, we brought the horses to our world.
Now it's our responsibility to help them understand, we hear, we understand, and we're going to do what's best for them. So our next beautiful guest speaker, she's all about the foundation of that welfare. The lovely Gayle Eckers, who weâre bringing in here from Equine Guelph. When we first met her, she asked us this beautiful question that we think about regularly.
It's âdoes good health equal good welfare?â It's a fantastic question. Really think about it, people, because so many of us get stuck in the idea that it's, you know, teeth, feet, but there's so much more to the welfare of the horse. We are so pleased to have the director of Equine Guelph here, Gayle Ecker, to join us here today.
Gayle: Hello, so pleased to be here and joining you.
Kari: This is a fun day, of course, even what's going to be happening today with all those fun facts that have to do with the horse.
But before we get started, why don't you introduce yourself and what your priority is and what you do to help these ponies globally around the world?
Gayle: Okay, well, thank you. So I'm the director of Equine Guelph. And I was one of the people that got Equine Guelph started 20 years ago.
This has been our 20th anniversary year. So we're very pleased about that. And yeah, it's all about health, welfare and safety.
That's our mandate. We stick to it. And so that comes in a variety of ways through our program.
We take money, donations plus industry funding to support the equine Guelph research program. And again, that's on the health and welfare of horses. And so money is allocated on industry priorities every year.
And as you would expect, we love to get the results back from that. And then that gets funneled into our communications program, so that people in the industry can learn as soon as we get from those results, we ship them out to our industry. They can learn how to better care for horses as a result of new research, which is a great, just a wonderful thing to have.
Then the next step for that is then we take all of that information and every year we update our education programs.One of the very cool things about equine Guelph now, considering we were just this little bitty entity that started 20 years ago at the University of Guelph. And literally, there was just me in the building for several months until we got it going.
Then Susan Raymond joined me and I built the staff from there. But we now have an online equine education program that was the first university senate approved course in the world. And we started that, if you can believe it, in 2002.
We have 19 courses now that attract anywhere from 900 to 1,000 students per year from over 40 different countries.
Kari: That is super exciting. I want to do fireworks.
Gayle: Yeah. Pretty cool for a Canadian university to be attracting students from over 40 different countries. We're the leading online equine education program out there for senate approved certificates and a diploma.
So that was the first thing we got going. And then we asked our industry, what did they want? And what was their blockage for education? That was one thing that we really wanted to learn from our industry. What they told us was, not unexpectedly, time and money.
We have to be very careful about how, where, we're putting our money when we have courses because we have responsibilities for caring. But many people still wanted to learn more. And so in 2015, we developed the horse portal.
On that horse portal are short courses. So there's like, I don't know what we're up to now. Something like two dozen different courses now that are one or two weeks and they're under $100 or around $100.
And some of them are on demand and others you do like as facilitated with an instructor and a guest speaker. So again, we're trying to give lots of options for horse people to try and make this an easy fit into their lives so that they can continue learning about horses.
Kari: Oh my goodness, like this is phenomenal. So where did this passion of yours come from to be able to help all of us people globally around the world to understand horses at a deeper level? It's not just a horse. It's not just a toy. It's not just a thing to use. What made you decide to get in with all of this passion?
Gayle: I'm not sure there was sort of one point. But I think my mother threw me up on a horse before I could walk. So I may not have had a choice.
She got me started with horses. But in kindergarten, I had my own little pony. He was dapple gray, a little Shetland.
Lovely big floppy mane that you couldn't see his eyes. Very sadly, our neighbors threw corn stalks into the field, which we didn't know about. They cleaned out their garden and threw all of the corn stalks in thinking that they were doing a lovely job for our horses. Well, guess who was stifflated the next morning? So that left a big impression on me that, wait a minute, the adults here don't know what they're doing.
Kari: Right?
Gayle: Which for a kid, you know, that's something that is quite shocking to a child. Because the adults know everything.
So that certainly had an impact on me. But over the years, I was much more interested in always, always the student. I love learning new things.
And to this day, I have always had a day where I've learned something new about horses, which to me, is critical. Because as you say, the horse has given us so much.
History has literally been written on the back of a horse. There is no other animal that has done for us what the horse has done for our society, even today.
So as you said, it is not a tool, this is a sentient being. And the new research is just really, really cool, exciting, fun about sentience in horses, and how we can train them better. And there's a lot more going on in those horses' brains and their whole bodies for behavior and learning ability.
We just need to be better humans with our horses in order to bring that out. We do that through knowledge.
Kari: Absolutely right and you know even through our certification, which I'm so excited that we partnered just because of the welfare of the horse. That's just so beautiful and beneficial to so many.
But you know, the one thing that as we're training our facilitators, they're always, oh, my gosh, I just didn't know. Oh, my gosh, I need to go back and apologize to my horse. And, you know, I always say to them, no matter what, though, we weren't there to learn that knowledge.
Yeah, this is why it's so imperative that we continually put in that effort to know because you don't know what you don't know. But, when you do know, that's when you're going to make the change for the horse.
Gayle: And it's your responsibility to share that information.
Always, we don't know what we don't know. And that's dangerous.
But when we think we know what we don't know, that's equally as dangerous. And that's one of the biggest challenges we have right now in our horse industry, people who know.
And so we see that all the time, you know, Facebook abounds by it. There's experts at every corner when the keyboard warriors come out.
And the thing is, science changes things. So what I thought I knew about founder, about colic, way back then, is not what we should be doing today. Because the job of science is to advance the knowledge and change it.
So we have to keep that open mind, we have to allow ourselves to think, could I be wrong?
And we're not going to be supporting the welfare of our horses the best we can.
Kari: You're absolutely right. We've coined a new piece around here where we've decided to say to ourselves and openly admit that we know nothing.
We know a lot about horses but when it comes to the grand scheme of things to humble ourselves and say we know nothing at this point in the grand scheme of what we can know, that's what allows us to be humble and keep on taking in new information, new research, new pieces to expand our knowledge. Because if you think you're done, if you think you know it all, you are doing a disservice to this industry and a disservice to your horses. And just putting that ignorant view aside really is what it is.
So we have to keep our minds open to learning new things and understanding more about our horses as the research comes in.
Kari: Yeah. And horses give us so much.
Gayle: You know, they're one of the few animals that just continues to give and give and give. And if we give them the right environment, and we treat them right, and we learn to communicate and let them communicate back to us, because that's a big thing when it comes to pain or confusion. We don't allow the horse to communicate back to us as a two-way street.
So those are all things that over the years I've learned so much and have so much more to learn. But those are such important concepts that, you know, I wish we could just sort of spread that out and let the water flow over all the horse owners and let them absorb this knowledge, because it would make such a difference for the horse.
Kari: So you all heard that, right? So that means it's your job, you have to be accountable for your horse and keep spreading it to your neighbors, to a friend you know, even to an enemy you know. You have to keep spreading it out there so we can all help this horse to feel safe and be at a different place that we weren't doing before. But now we can because we have that.
Continued in Part 2â¦