The March 14th, Pegasus Therapeutic Riding Academy Clinic was on the topic of “Horse Behavior”. Volunteers and our advanced riders were invited to sign up and attend this clinic in our 2015 clinic schedule. With the help of one of our Pegasus horses, Tonka, Assistant Director, Teresa Doherty led an informative session showing our volunteers and riders about basic horse behavior. We have some pretty special and unique horses on our Pegasus horse staff. As Teresa led the clinic, she introduced one of our new horse staff member, Tonka. Therapeutic riding lessons and situations are very different than a traditional ‘lesson barn’ setting. Due to the unique situations, sounds and environments our horses are placed under at Pegasus, we use various methods to help train our horses to be comfortable with our lessons and riders.Teresa talked about how horses learn and process commands that we give them and used Tonka to demonstrate some basic tasks expected of him at Pegasus. She was ableto show our volunteers and riders some great examples of how to ask a horse to do something the right way vs. the wrong way according to how a horse processes the command given.One of the more important points that Teresa used during the clinic was how the handler, volunteers and riders body languages are interpretted by the horses. As we are using our unmounted lessons into our lesson program, this is a specific skill we work on developing with our riders.
Interested in learning more about our Pegasus clinics? Thanks to Teresa and Tonka for putting on an informative and fun clinic at Pegasus Therapeutic Riding Academy in Philadelphia, PA.