Paul Sherland - Podcast Details

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Senior Horsemanship - Tips to Help Us Enjoy Better Years with Horses and More of ThemPlanning for After UsIn this episode of the Senior Horsemanship Podcast, I talk about planning for after us. That is planning for our horses' care if we can't care for them anymore.One possibility is to adopt a horse from a rescue like Bluebonnet Equine Humane Society. Bluebonnet retains ownership of the horse and will always take the horse back if the adopter can't care for it. Bluebonnet will also provide training and fostering to make the horse more adoptable. If you don't live in Texas, perhaps there's a rescue with similar policies.Another option is to provide...2023-03-1105 min

Senior Horsemanship - Tips to Help Us Enjoy Better Years with Horses and More of ThemTop Reasons for a Senior to Volunteer with Bluebonnet Equine Humane SocietyThere are many good reasons for seniors to volunteer for Bluebonnet Equine Humane Society in Texas or at similar horse rescues in other areas. According to Dr. Jennifer Williams, Executive Director at Bluebonnet, the top reasons are:Seniors fostering horses can do that for a limited time and get a fostering stipend to offset some of the costs of having horses.Seniors volunteering in other ways can be involved in promoting the welfare of horses without the responsibilities and costs of owning horses. If you have a skill or interest, there's probably something you can do to help...2023-03-0509 min

Senior Horsemanship - Tips to Help Us Enjoy Better Years with Horses and More of ThemTop Reasons to Adopt a Horse from Bluebonnet Equine Humane SocietySo in summary, here are four good reasons why you should consider adopting from Bluebonnet if you’re a senior living in Texas.#1 - You get an honest health and training history for the horse you adopt. Anything Bluebonnet knows, you will know. #2 - You get a 30 day period to try the horse at your barn and if the horse doesn’t work out, you can return the horse and get your adoption fee back. #3 - If your circumstances change and due to finances or health, you can’t keep your horse Bluebonnet will alw...2023-02-2425 min

Senior Horsemanship - Tips to Help Us Enjoy Better Years with Horses and More of ThemWhat's a Good Horseman or HorsewomanIt comes back to whether or not we accept that definition of a good horseman or horsewoman: “A good horseman or horsewoman is someone who, in an educated way, always puts the best interest of the horse first and foremost.”This is a quote from the book, Begin and Begin Again - The Bright Optimism of Reinventing Life with Horses, by Denny Emerson.Welcome to the Senior Horsemanship Podcast. Which was the Second Half Horsemanship Podcast. We'll be talking about better horsemanship in the senior part of life. For most of us that means horsemanship for...2022-12-1905 min

Senior Horsemanship - Tips to Help Us Enjoy Better Years with Horses and More of ThemYour Invitation to Future HorsemanshipA burden of these years is to allow all the stereotypes of old age to hold me back. To hold me down. To stop the flow of life in me. A blessing of these years. Is that they give me the chance to break the bounds of a past life. And to create for myself, a life more suited to what I now want to be. This is a quote from the book, The Gift of Years, Growing Older Gracefully, by Joan Chittister.Do you want to be able to ride for years into t...2022-12-1206 min

Senior Horsemanship - Tips to Help Us Enjoy Better Years with Horses and More of ThemSenior Horsemanship for the Love of ItI’ve also become increasingly aware of how challenging it is to age. Our bodies change, grief finds us more frequently, we listen as our doctor tells us about invasive health screenings we must endure. Health insurance goes up and energy goes down.But along with all of that, I also notice the frost on a horse’s whiskers in the winter. How on a chilly morning, the wind catches the mist of their breath. How standing beside them allows me to calm down and experience a grounded sense of peace. The rhythmic sound of horses chewing. Watc...2022-12-0505 min

Senior Horsemanship - Tips to Help Us Enjoy Better Years with Horses and More of ThemWelcome to the Senior Horsemanship PodcastA burden of these years is to fail to get beyond the bitterness of having been displaced, and to not see that being moved quietly off all the platforms of life is also to be free of the stagecraft that goes with them. A blessing of these years is to wake up one morning and find ourselves drunk with a very thought of being alive. Then wherever we go, we will spread the joy we have finally been able to find in ourselves. This is a quote from the book, The Gift of Years, Growing...2022-11-2704 min

Senior Horsemanship - Tips to Help Us Enjoy Better Years with Horses and More of ThemThe Evolution of This Podcast in HorsemanshipThe Second Half Horsemanship Podcast has its roots in much earlier efforts. About 12 years ago, I launched a Yahoo group and a website called Mature Riders which was intended for horse people in middle-age. I was in my late fifties so the timing seemed about right. Then in 2015, I launched a website called Saddle Up Again for riders in midlife and beyond. That attracted some interest, but it seemed to be targeting a group that didn't identify itself as midlife and beyond. That made it a marketing challenge. So earlier this year I launched the Se...2022-11-2103 min

Senior Horsemanship - Tips to Help Us Enjoy Better Years with Horses and More of ThemThe Evolution of Learning in HorsemanshipWhen I was a kid, I was largely taught by more experienced horse people. My mentors owned a riding school and I worked casually for them in exchange for lessons. They taught me everything from how to tie a knot to how to perform a half halt and position a horse in front of a jump. All the basic skills that a person needs to know at the beginning began by religiously following the instruction of my two mentors. I didn’t think too much about what I was told or why things were done that way. It was wh...2022-11-1404 min

Senior Horsemanship - Tips to Help Us Enjoy Better Years with Horses and More of ThemHorsemanship Is Individual to You and Your HorseThere is so much variation in the human individual that the approach has to be a little different in order to fit each person. They might come out with the same results as someone else, but if everyone tried to take the same approach, there wouldn’t be too many of them coming out with the same solution. That’s another thing I think is important to emphasize — this is an individual process. I tell people that over and over when they are trying to get something worked out. I say, “All I can do is try to help.” It has to...2022-11-0705 min

Senior Horsemanship - Tips to Help Us Enjoy Better Years with Horses and More of ThemAdjust and Learn as You Go - a Quote from the Book, Range, by David EpsteinApproach your own personal voyage and projects like Michelangelo approached a block of marble, willing to learn and adjust as you go, and even to abandon a previous goal and change directions entirely should the need arise. Research on creators in domains from technological innovation to comic books shows that a diverse group of specialists cannot fully replace the contributions of broad individuals. Even when you move from an area of work or an entire domain, that experience is not wasted.My initial spark of interest in this topic came after reading viral articles and watching conference...2022-10-3005 min

Senior Horsemanship - Tips to Help Us Enjoy Better Years with Horses and More of ThemBetter Horsemanship and Better Podcasts Take TimeNothing great, said Epictetus, is produced suddenly, since not even the grape or the fig is. If you say to me now that you want a fig, I will answer to you that it requires time: let it flower first, then put forth fruit, and then ripen. If, then, the fruit of a fig tree not perfected suddenly and in one hour, would you possess the fruit of a man’s mind in so short a time and so easily? Do not expect it, even if I tell you.This quote is from the book, The Discourses of...2022-10-2503 min

Senior Horsemanship - Tips to Help Us Enjoy Better Years with Horses and More of ThemForce Will Not Get Rid of NervousnessIs the use of force really going to get rid of a horse’s nervousness? Are you joking? It’s obviously going to make it worse and worse. It has no place to go but downhill. And that is the secret about using force on a horse, any time, any place, for almost any reason. The more force you use, the more scared he gets. The more scared he gets, the more he resists. The more he resists, the more force you use.See where this is going? Your only hope is to feel that original nervous tens...2022-10-2404 min

Senior Horsemanship - Tips to Help Us Enjoy Better Years with Horses and More of ThemHelmets and Hay - An Anna Blake CommentIn hushed moments, we know that is our sacred promise to horses. We buy their hay. I was sternly corrected for these words, so I’ll double down and be more clear. Call “buying hay” the tip of the financial and emotional iceberg, call it an abbreviation for the ways we alter our lives for horses, for the love and commitment that we offer freely. It’s the base level, the easy task, cheaper than the list of pros we hire for their care, but it stands in front of the rest… if you ask horses. We’re romantic; horses are p...2022-10-2205 min

Senior Horsemanship - Tips to Help Us Enjoy Better Years with Horses and More of ThemCompete IF the Horse Comes FirstSports only have meaning because a certain group of humans ascribes meaning to those activities. Think about the passion demonstrated by groups of adults on Saturday fall afternoons sitting in front of television sets. From listening to the screams of ecstasy and wails of despair you might think the survival of earth was at stake, instead of whether some other human carried a ball across some line drawn on some field.In horse sports, it seems to me, that the FIRST question to ask is whether or not it does harm to the horses.The...2022-10-2004 min

Senior Horsemanship - Tips to Help Us Enjoy Better Years with Horses and More of ThemYour Second Half Mind Fosters WisdomScientists used to think that brain connections developed at a rapid pace in the first few years of life, until you reached your mental peak in your early 20s. Your cognitive abilities would level off at around middle age, and then start to gradually decline. We now know this is not true. Instead, scientists now see the brain as continually changing and developing across the entire life span. There is no period in life when the brain and its functions just hold steady. Some cognitive functions become weaker with age, while others actually improve.Some brain areas...2022-10-1805 min

Senior Horsemanship - Tips to Help Us Enjoy Better Years with Horses and More of ThemReward the Trust Your Horse Gives YouAs the little horse stood quietly with his head in my arms, a lady in the crowd who owned a local Arabian farm of her own spoke up. “Buck, now that you’ve gotten this horse coming around the way you have, when would we be able to start with the whips again? Would we be able to start tomorrow or would we have to wait till next week?”She had no idea what she was saying. It was the most bizarre thing I’d ever heard, and from a woman who appeared to be so sophisticated. How coul...2022-10-1606 min

Senior Horsemanship - Tips to Help Us Enjoy Better Years with Horses and More of ThemKeeping the Joy in the HorseWe often forget that horses can do what they do, often in spite of us. In spite of our tension, our imbalance, our defiant grasp on the reins and our breath. A horse and rider can be poetry or a master’s work of art. Horses make us grander than we are on our own two feet. Their four hooves become an expression of what moves us when no one’s looking.We often give ourselves credit for the activities horses do with us, as though we were the ones who taught them what it means to rise...2022-10-1503 min

Senior Horsemanship - Tips to Help Us Enjoy Better Years with Horses and More of ThemShare Joy in Horsemanship in the Second Half of LifeWe can decide to live with joy. Or we can allow ourselves to live looking back with bitterness. We can be bitter about all the things we wanted to do, but felt too constrained to risk. We can be bitter for all the hours we gave to a company that was able to say goodbye to us, without so much as remembering to send a card at Christmastime. We can be bitter because we chose security and independence rather than depth and companionship. We can decide to be bitter because at the end, only the end is left. But...2022-10-1203 min

Senior Horsemanship - Tips to Help Us Enjoy Better Years with Horses and More of ThemChoose in the Best Interest of the Horse“The point I would hope to make is that my choices and your choices are all valid as long as we adhere to the first principle of horsemanship — that whatever we choose is always in the best interest of the horse.”This is a quote Denny Emerson from the closing paragraph of Begin and Begin Again: The Bright Optimism of Reinventing Life with Horses.In describing that competitive mindset he says, “everything I had been doing was based on too much — too much force, too much pressure, too much too soon, too much assumption that my horse k...2022-10-1003 min

Senior Horsemanship - Tips to Help Us Enjoy Better Years with Horses and More of ThemYou Need to Be Willing to ExperimentI’ve found that no matter what experience you have, you really need to experiment. I think that is what good trainers actually do. They ride and they have their antennas out, and they’re always feeling for things.So I want you to use your feel more than your logic. Don’t just repeat aids that you see in a book. After you’ve experimented, and you’ve found what your horse tells you he needs, then you can go home and try to figure out the logic of what just worked and why. The bottom line is, t...2022-10-0904 min

Senior Horsemanship - Tips to Help Us Enjoy Better Years with Horses and More of ThemOur Horses Are Always Communicating with UsEvery once in a while somebody will ask me how can we know what a horse is thinking and feeling since they don’t talk. My answer is always that they do talk. They never shut up. They just don’t verbalize a lot. But they are definitely chatterboxes and I for one am glad they can’t verbalize their thoughts. Problem is that we confuse our inability to hear them with their inability to talk.This is a quote from Ross Jacobs on his Good Horsemanship - Ross Jacobs Facebook page. Here's a link to his websit...2022-10-0702 min

Senior Horsemanship - Tips to Help Us Enjoy Better Years with Horses and More of ThemHelping Your Horse Can Strengthen a ConnectionSnowman would do anything my dad asked of him, and I believe that is because Snowman understood that my dad saved him and that down deep, the two of them were connected and somehow both of their lives were gonna be affected forever because they met.This is a quote from Harriet deLeyer from the movie, Harry and Snowman. Harriet is talking about the relationship between her father, Harry deLeyer, and Snowman, the $80 former plow horse rescued from a truck bound for a slaughter house. Snowman later was named Horse of the Year and the pair won...2022-10-0503 min

Senior Horsemanship - Tips to Help Us Enjoy Better Years with Horses and More of ThemSome Horses Shouldn't Be RiddenSometimes accidents happen even when we are with horses whole-heartedly, and sometimes this takes the heart we have for horses right out of us. However, at some point, we must make the decision to be with horses or to be without them. In or out. It’s a decision we will be required to make again and again if we choose to keep spending our life in their hay-munching company.This is a quote from the book, Continuing the Ride - Rebuilding Confidence from the Ground Up, by Crissi McDonald.The wonderful book, Continuing the Ri...2022-10-0504 min

Senior Horsemanship - Tips to Help Us Enjoy Better Years with Horses and More of ThemHorse People and Their Horses Have One JobHorse people have only one job. And horses have only one job. It’s the most important job and it's the job that supersedes all other jobs. Nothing is more important when it comes to training. The job is to be focused and connected. That’s it. That’s the job. Even when doing other jobs, staying focused and connected to our horse and our horse to us overrides all other jobs in importance.The one condition to the “one job” principle is that focus and connection are only important if you want a good relationship and a partners...2022-10-0404 min