All terrain wheelchair access.

I am not a serious hiker, birdwatcher, naturalist and certainly not a keep fit freak, indeed I have always scrupulously avoided any form of gratuitous exercise. I amble across country because it gives me pleasure. I love the coastline, and wandering along beaches, and I love the sense of space walking across Dartmoor, or any of the high wide and open spaces that the British Isles are dotted with.

Most pleasures are better shared, (not all, see my opinion on sharing burgers with Obama) but certainly, the more people I see enjoying the country, the happier I am. Like William Cobbett in Rural Rides, I prefer a landscape with figures. And that means increasing the access.

Access is a thorny subject, the Enclosures Acts, which deprived huge swathes of the population of their rights, and in many case their lives, left only a tiny percentage of the UK open to the citizens of the UK, and those bits were the bits that nobody could be bothered to deprive us of legally. Of course their perceived worthlessness was because they are basically inaccessible.

My work over the last couple of years has been to get the iBex to a stage where most of the bits of the UK we are still allowed on, are accessible to a much wider group. Although it is a wheelchair enabled vehicle, that doesn't mean it can only be driven from a wheelchair, just that anyone can use it to enjoy those bits we are still allowed to enjoy, and that includes wheelchair users. To give you some idea of the sort of terrain the iBex will handle, this slideshow was all taken on one trip, with me staying in the wheelchair throughout.

This is a work in progress, and I have currently stopped to go and drive the iBex somewhere else. More pics will  follow.

Horses scared of driving vehicles.

It is pretty much accepted that horses are scared of driving vehicles. Most of the riders who come past Obama are kicking and whipping their animals to get past, which really upsets Obama who hates whips, and upsets the riders, who hate me pointing out that my pony hates whips.
So why are horses scared of driving vehicles? Or more to the point, are horses scared of driving vehicles? A couple of days ago I took the iBex up to Belstone to play, and see if I could drive up Belstone Tor in a wheelchair, as you do.

Life got complicated the minute we entered Belstone Common as we were promptly mugged by three very small handbags.
These ponies are the marginally more valuable ponies as apparently they are favoured on the continent for designer pony skin handbags. I can't decide wheether this is more unpleasant than the other market, stuffing them as designer rocking horses.
But as you can see, regardless of their eventual fate, they are not scared of the iBex, demonstrably, a horse drawn vehicle. Since this was my first time on this bit of Dartmoor, they had never seen me or the vehicle before, and when this photo was taken, we had only just got throught the gate above the water treatment plant.

We carried on for half a mile or so, with an attentive audience until we headed for the Tor, when the handbags left us, not noticeably terrified, but then nobody was kicking them, hitting them or jabbing them in the mouth with a bit.

After stooging around having fun and deciding against the route up the Tor on the grounds of dodgy visibility, driving drizzle, and Obama's near permanent determination to go back and play with his new found friends, we headed back for the gate to the Common.

Where we found a new bunch of ponies to play with and Obama set off at speed.

The ponies were obviously scared, Unknown pony, weird vehicle, weirder bloke, evil moustache etc...

But they didn't stay scared, the minute I decided that we were going maybe a touch fast, for unknown ground, from a wheelchair, chasing wild ponies etc Obama and I set off for the gate. With the ponies following on.......

So we head off through the gate, down through Belstone to see the river by the sheepfold, and come back across the green where we meet three riders.
Obama was trotting enthusiastically towards them when the leader screamed that she had two complete novices riding. So I pulled Obama up, bitless, no problem, and stood while they headed up to the road with the leader shouting "put the leg on".

I was rather expecting to hear the beginners shouting back that their legs hadn't actually come off, but next moment, one rider had come off and you can see the horse legging it home on the right, the other beginner being carted home in the middle, and the one whose legs torso and head had all come off, running behind. The leader is out of frame on the left.

So wild ponies have no problems with driving vehicles, even when they have just been galloped at them, while riding school animals are so terrified they flee. I wouldn't say they were naturally scared of horse drawn vehicles. I would say they had been taught to fear them. Why, and How, are complex subjects and I will come back to them.
So before you next say your horse or pony is scared of a horse drawn vehicle, or anything it hasn't seen before, ask yourself, why it is scared, and whose fault is it. The ponies that weren't scared hadn't been trained, and hadn't got people sitting on them, banging them in the mouth, hitting them with sticks or performing reconstructive surgery and putting their legs on.
I had fun, wheelchairs across dartmoor are pure fun with the iBex, and Obama in a hooligan mood.

Meat Eating Horses, second course.

CuChullaine O'Reilly is getting a fair amount of flak for his book Deadly Equines, mostly because it is a book. The standard criticism is that CuChullaine has deliberately made the topic interesting, and focused on the more eccentric dietary habits of horses rather than a carefully tabulated description of the average horse's diet. Yes he has, because Deadly Equines is a book and books only exist because people want to read them. Books that people don't want to read have a short and ignominious shelf life.
CuChullaine has persuaded a lot of people to look at their pony, or horse's diet of choice. The fact that a horse eats all its hay is not a guideline to what it likes, it eats the hay because it is locked in a 12X12 box with nothing else to eat and nothing to do. Under the circumstances I might eat hay.
I experimented with Obama's diet on Tuesday at the Shillingford Organic Farm Open day. Feeling peckish I ordered a burger, one of the West Town Farm organic burgers, made from their own beef, and totally superb. It was served with an extensive salad, hardboiled egg and pasta in tomato sauce. Obama thought it looked delicious, in which he was dead right, and that it was his to share.
One consequence of the journeys we have done together is that Obama sees all food as his, so the few moments when I decide to eat something rapidly descend into a squabble. This was no exception. I tried Obama on  the various exotic and delicious leaves which garnished my burger, every one of which Obama rejected. They were good, it shows how low I have sunk that I am eating lettuce spurned by my pony. The egg, he says is great, he adores the pasta in tomato sauce but absolutely rejects the tomato, will accept cucumber, but isn't over keen, piles into the bread, and absolutely loves the burger.
I only gave him two small bits of meat because it was quite clearly my burger, not his, and I was hungry, and we both agree the burger was delicious, but as I said, it was MINE. I am aware this is not a scientific survey, in the same way that CuChullaine is aware that Daedly Equines is a book, not a peer reviewed research paper.
But it does make me start thinking about the behaviour of an omnivore as opposed to a carnivore. The idea that their digestive systems are totally different seems to be disproved by the cross breeding of Polar Bears and Brown Bears. The Polar Bear is carnivorous while the ferocious Grizzly is omnivorous, yet they can mate and produce offspring.
Maybe the horse's ancestry has omnivores and even carnivores, closer than we think, and some of the behaviour patterns may still be in the genes. And Yes folks this is a blog not a peer reviewed etc. I am chucking out ideas, and thinking that pony and horse behaviour may not be the simple "prey species" pattern we expect.
To the endlessly repeated comments that CuChullaine is talking about captive animals and it is all our fault, while there is certainly an element of that, let us look at the Red Deer on Rum, no not pissed ruminants, but the animals on the island next to Eigg and Muck which have been snacking on the heads and feet of baby Manx Shearwaters. The report makes fascinating reading, mentioning the sheep that eat live Tern and Skua chicks on Foula. I will studiously avoid any discussions about whether it is Foula to eat when it's not your Tern......
If CuChullaine's book makes us think about our pony's diet, and I can work out a way to stop him eating my burger, he will have achieved something worthwhile. Remember, Deadly Equine's is a book, and the natural behaviour of a book is to try to find a buyer. Get yourself a copy of Deadly Equine, it will make you think, and that is always a good thing.

Training 2

Yesterday I was pretty smug about getting Obama to relax on bridges, but as you would expect it has all gone pear shaped today. I can't get him across bridges. I can get him onto bridges, but when he reaches the middle he looks down on the thundering lorries and herds of Harleys and stands there, clearly saying "this is an incredibly high stress situation for a delicate little pony, and I need shed loads of carrots or a good ten minutes scratching before I will move".
This makes journeys over bridges just as problematic, but for the opposite reason.
However he behaved like a total star when a white van nearly took us out on a narrow road. Guy was just going to fast to stop and slid past us, Johnny Cash blaring, and managed to avoid the van which had stopped coming the other way.
But we still had the total terror performance on at least three occasions for absolutely no visible reason, and I just led him past till he decided either that the terrifying thing had gone, or that the game was boring.
We did manage to perfect team blackberrying. With enough blackberries, Obama can take out all the ones at his head level, and there are plenty for me at my level. Of course once Obama's blackberries run out, he speeds up, normally when my hand is in the wrong place for a move forwards. Oh well, nothing is perfect.

Training

I took Obama out for that fine Bank Holiday tradition, sitting in traffic in the rain,but the weather held off, and between Shillingford and Exeter the traffic was pretty cool, so we just buzzed down the flood relief channel to the river and Obama practiced bolting.
Everything was scary, sheep, sheep droppings, sheep footprints, lack of sheep footprints and so on ad infinitum.
We blatted around the area between the Quay and the Double Locks, either flat out with Obama waving his feet in my face, or sidling terrified towards some totally mythical threat. I am fitting the kicking strap before I drive again because high speed kicking hammering cross country through trees is distracting to say the least. Heading back home took forever, mostly with me leading an apparently terrified pony, who could only relax when his teeth were firmly anchored in a dandelion.
I could have brained him as a bad mannered, awkward, bloody minded so and so except for one factor. He went over the bridge over the A30 like an angel on the way out, and like an angel on the way home. His fear of bridges, ie bridges going over main roads, is entirely my fault. I took him over the very narrow curly footbridge over the A30 from Ide to Exeter with heavy traffic thundering under him at 70, and he has never forgiven me, or not till today. So he went through the foot bridge on the flood relief channel absolutely panicking at some really good new graffiti, but strolls over the A30 stopping to itch his backside halfway across.
He hasn't been out since we got back from Sussex on Tuesday, I don't know if he needed a rest, but I certainly did, so his performance was mostly about wanting to go out and fool around. But he has got over one of his major fears and I don't seem to have done anything except take him out and let him fool around. Some would say I never do much else, but working with the disabled, I expect, and get, reasonable behaviour from Obama.
His sympathy with learning difficulties isn't anything I taught him. His perfect behaviour when Isobel leads him, is I am sure, done to show me that he will behave perfectly for seven year olds, it is only idiots like me who can't handle him.
So I end a day with an absolutely brilliant result, but not one I was aiming for, or one that I did anything about. I feel the lessons from Dr Irene Pepperberg's parrot, Alex, are more relevant to horsemanship than we realise. And the main lesson is that they learn from us, all the time, except when we become unintelligible, because we are trying to teach.

Meat eating horses.

CuChullaine O'Reilly is not the sort of guy you want to be behind at airline check ins. A good Irish name, so he should trip the IRA button, worked with the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan (but long before Bush's crusade) and a passport with more stamps than Stanley Gibbons, so you just know they are going to work him over. And now he has upset a whole new group. Yes the militant wing of the Pony Club have put out a contract on him, and loads more will follow.
His crime, telling the truth about horses.
Deadly Equines is his latest book, sensational, controversial and I disagree with large chunks of it, but that is rather like discussing bears' sylvan bathroom habits. Any book worth writing will get me to disagree with large chunks, and while my writing is a model of quiet reason everyone else's is sensational etc. The alternative is far worse, boring.
About every twenty pages I was overcome with the urge to contact CuChullaine to tell him he was talking out of his backside, massaging the data, drawing the wrong conclusions etc, but I kept going back to the text and found that I had read right through without sending a single snotty email to tell him where he was wrong.
I am now working on a long and complicated article to tell CuChullaine why I think he is right and to suggest various different directions in which he might wish to pursue his research.  What surprised me, given the depth and range of his research, was missing the comment on the killer pony in the mines from George Orwell's "Road to Wigan Pier."
If you want to find out what I am talking about, now and in my next few posts, reading  Deadly Equines is an absolute necessity.
It ranks with Rebecca Cassidy's Horse People  and Temple Grandin's "Animals in Translation" as it forces you to rethink whole chunks of your equestrian experience.
CuChullaine, I still disagree with loads of it, but trying to work out why I disagree, exposes my beliefs to evidence that goes the wrong way. The argument will continue, for which I can only say, Thanks.

Fear and riding in South Devon.

It lacks the zing of Hunter S's brilliant book, but I needed a working title so there it is. I was driving south of Exeter, up Haldon Hill and past the Belvedere, just to keep Obama fit and I met a couple of leading rein ponies. The young and nervous riders were 5 or 6 at a guess, and had little obvious control over their mounts, which is par for the course.

When one of the ponies squealed and reared a couple of inches (I was watching his feet so I know) the rider burst into tears. But what amazed me was the adult leading the pony saying, "Don't be scared. The pony can sense fear."

Why not say, "Don't be five years old and a novice." You would have the same chance of being obeyed, and you would have identified the reason for the fear. Can you think of any circumstance when being told not to be scared will make you less scared. No, I can't either.

But to add to the problem, the scared child is then told that the pony will sense her fear. Will that make her any less scared. If you are facing an enormous bouncer, and you are told that being scared of him will make him attack, just how relaxed will you be.

It is demonstrably true that the pony can sense fear. But what does a pony do when it's leader is scared. Treat him with contempt, kick him, run away from him. Let's take the obvious analogy, herd leader (choose whether male or female according to which book you read last) sees a lion stalking towards the herd looking ravenously hungry. If the herd leader isn't scared he will carry on grazing and some of the herd are going to be lunch.

If he/she is scared, the smell of scared herd leader, and the sight of scared herd leader and the sound of scared herd leader will tell the herd that there is a threat around.  They will then look to the herd leader to get some idea of what to do. Maybe the obvious area to flee is into a box canyon, so the herd leader, while looking, smelling and sounding scared, will lead the herd towards the threat so they can escape off to the side to real safety.

A herd leader that is never scared is going to be somebody's lunch pretty soon. Fear is the norm if you are a prey species. So when you are riding, and a lion approaches, is your horse going to respect you because you remain calm and unafraid? No, he is going to think you are a brain dead prat who deserves to die, and will wonder why he has to risk his neck hauling your useless carcase out of danger.

Courage is respected by the army, and I have massive respect for those who risk, and frequently lose their lives, fighting for us. But I am sure Obama would be able to detect fear in the guys walking towards an IED, or patrolling or just sitting waiting for incoming mortar rounds. He wouldn't lose respect for them and nor do I. I respect courage, which is the ability to take the right decision while scared.

Not being scared when there is a clear and obvious risk,  like sitting on a pony over which you have no control, is a sign that you are stupid. Somebody telling you not to be scared is rather more stupid.

The obvious requirement for a pony with a small, inexperienced, and almost by definition, nervous child on its back, is that it should be with people it trusts, and in places where it feels safe. Then the fear from the child will be treated as the natural behaviour of someone who doesn't know the area. But if the pony doesn't know and trust the people, and the area, then you have an accident waiting to happen and the adults concerned are stupid, and what is worst, trying to make the child feel that it is the child's fault that everything is not going smoothly.

Basically telling a child not to be scared because the pony will sense his fear, is stupid on about three different levels and the best known way to put children off riding. But telling people not to be stupid is nearly as pointless as telling them not to be scared.