- Uncategorized (12)
- 13/11/2008: What gift do you give to someone with too much "stuff"?
- 13/11/2008: How great is Linda Parelli!
- 28/10/2008: Attention all Headteachers!
- 28/10/2008: ATTENTION ALL WILD MUMS & DADS!
- 28/10/2008: Christmas has come early - and it's a white one!
- 07/09/2008: Only at Highland Wildrides!
- 07/09/2008: Lairg Show Results!
- 07/09/2008: Parelli at the NEC.
- 20/08/2008: Attention Thursday Night Riders!
- 13/08/2008: Congratulations Wildriders!
What gift do you give to someone with too much “stuff”?
13/11/2008 by admin.
For full details of gift packages and vouchers go to www.highlandwildrides.co.uk
Got too much “stuff” in your house?
This link will take you to our gift page on our website for full details of excellent ideas for Christmas presents for those who have a cluttered indoors and love the outdoors!
http://www.highlandwildrides.co.uk/gifts.html
We also do vouchers, and if you like our ideas then don’t forget to put it on your own list for Santa!
The Highland Wildrides team will also contact you shortly to give you full details of our open day once our new yard is finished.
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How great is Linda Parelli!
13/11/2008 by admin.
I just thought I would share this with my regulars.
As you all know I love Parelli, so I thought I would drop them a line telling them how great we were getting on with it. I told them that I actually owed them an apology for having ignored them for years when I was looking for training methods! I then went off to my evening class at college where some friends and I are all studying for our HNC in Equine Studies and by the time we returned a few hours later I had received a reply - from no less than Linda herself! I could see from the message that it had been forwarded onto her by Parelli.com and I think they may be going to use some of it as a testimonial.
I am so impressed I can not tell you! Linda must be a very busy woman so I was really touched that she had taken the time out to drop a line back.
Here’s what she sent to me…….
Dear Stacie,
I loved reading your letter… what a fun grabber that you owed us an
apology! I’m thrilled to hear of your results and especially your
willingness to try something else after all the disappointments you’d
been through, I too know what that’s like. So I’m glad you’ve found
our program and you’ll never look back. If you’re at the NEC in
November 09, please come and say ‘hi’.
Yours naturally,
Linda Parelli
PS It’s great to hear that you’re interested to become a Parelli
Professional… there’s a lot of people who need you!
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Attention all Headteachers!
28/10/2008 by admin.
We at Highland Wildrides would like to offer you a fantastic opportunity to introduce your pupils to our horses with an introductory half price offer on our 1hr treks. We have a unique riding centre that offers world class trekking on the rare Scottish native breeds, and it has been brought to our attention that we may be able to assist you with outdoor learning as part of the new curriculum for excellence.
Horse riding provides children with a huge range of benefits including;
It provides exercise outdoors.
It teaches children about responsibility
It teaches children about commitment
It teaches children to focus on tasks
It tones poorly developed muscles and improves coordination
It builds confidence
It teaches group lessons about team work and compassion for others
It makes children aware of rural matters
As we specialise in Scottish natives we are also able to give a historical and cultural slant to the outdoor learning. We can inform your pupils of the origins of each of the breeds and the areas they come from whilst walking them through a landscape that is full of historical monuments from as far back as 3000BC!
In addition to this offer we are also happy to take your pupils on placements for work experience and rural skills. We are fully licensed by the Highland Council and we also carry a high level of liability insurance cover to enable us to cater for groups of children.
Our normal price for an hours trek is £20 and we give a 10% discount to groups of 5 or more. We would like to enable you to sample our trekking by offering you a discount of 50% on the first trek you book with us so that you can see whether or not this is the sort of outdoor learning your pupils would enjoy. All schools that participate in this offer will receive a voucher for an hours trek for two people to be used as a prise or gift for fundraising for your school.
If you would like more details then please call us on 01863 766 771 or take a look at our fantastic new website www.highlandwildrides.co.uk
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ATTENTION ALL WILD MUMS & DADS!
28/10/2008 by admin.
Pony care lessons are half the price of a riding lesson.
However, there will still be days when it is just too rotten for small kids to be out at all or weather which is too dangerous to be on the yard such as high winds when the horses become spooky. On days like these we will post a cancellation on our website www.highlandwildrides.co.uk on the events calendar under the relevant date. We would also be able to send you an email if you can provide us with your email address. This would also be very handy to keep you all up to date on upcoming events such as the Halloween parade and the open day once the new barn is built.
We are hoping that the new barn will be fully functional this side of Christmas and will provide the kids with an area that is completely covered to enjoy pony care and indoor activities such as tack cleaning competitions, quizzes and talks. It will house a petting zoo as well as the horses, the feed, the tack and a reception.
Work on the barn begins this week and in order to make it as speedy as possible we will be closed from Friday 14th November until Tuesday 25th of November.
So we hope to see you all soon and look forward to playing more mounted games!
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Christmas has come early - and it’s a white one!
28/10/2008 by admin.
We have been dancing round here like kids before Christmas for weeks now, eagerly awaiting the arrival of diggers, and cement mixers, men in yellow jackets, and lots of commotion as we start to build our long awaited American Barn and new yard! The excitement has been building and now we have woken up on our “Christmas Morning” to find it’s a white one!
It has snowed all night long, and is still snowing now at almost mid day so the first fall of winter has not melted away, but is now covering the flat packed barn that has sat in the car park for 3 whole years!
Now, I very much doubt that a little snow is going to make any difference to an 18 tonne track machine, but it is impeding its progress and excitement is giving away to frustration - frustration that it has not arrived yet, and frustration that the constant snow showers are going to make it difficult to view the work of the contractors across the field from the old yard!
Of course the equine members of staff are completely oblivious to our intentions, and whilst they stand miserably in mud and the snow sits on their rugs they have no idea that we are planning to make them a cosy new dwelling complete with winter feeding corral so that they need never feel a drop of rain or flake of snow again. This is our foal, Lottie’s, first ever snow. She seems a little interested but is safely tucked up in our current barn to prevent her charging around and hurting herself and is mainly ignoring it in favour of her haylage.
However, there is one type of Wildride creature that can’t ignore the snow, and that is of course, the huskies. They are so excited by the snow that they are making the barn worshippers look unmoved! Currently Nuke and Kramer are out in the pen charging around, wrestling, rolling, and cavorting in it. The fact that Nuke has a completely nude belly after recently being spayed seems to mean nothing to her. However, we shall take her inside and warm her up with cuddles on the sofa afterwards!
The sled dogs have started their training a little late this year as we have had such a busy October holiday, and September was very warm and humid making it difficult to get them out in case they overheated which is more likely at the start of training as they are fairly unfit. Our volunteer kennel maid, Trini, has been starting them off with their Gee/Haw training (teaching them their left [Haw] from their right [Gee]) which is the first stage in our fittening and training program. She is hoping to race a team in junior events for us this year so she has been doing the training mainly unaided to ensure the dogs will take direction from her, and has done extremely well as they seem to really have got the idea pretty quickly. Most of them are just in need of a refresher, but some of our young dogs are learning for the first time.
Initially this is done on the lead and we take them into the riding school and walk them round a prepared obstacle course consisting of shapes and junctions that can be reversed to enable us to use both commands. The course is different each time we use it so that they never become conditioned to a route and have to really use their brains to decipher what the commands mean.
Eventually we move onto doing this out on a trail doing “Canicross” which is basically a jog with a dog. For this we put the dogs in harness and onto very long lines that are attached to abseiling harnesses worn by the handlers. The handlers jog (fairly effortlessly) behind the dogs who pull them. This is a great way to get mushers and dogs fit enough to pull a rig or sled before we them move onto the next stage which is teaming them up, and finally getting them fast by running them from the front of our dune buggy. We use abseiling harnesses rather than specially designed waist belts as a couple of our dogs are incredibly strong and we need to be able to really sit into the harnesses with all our weight if we need to stop them. There is no way we could hold onto them on a plain lead, and we have had problems with shoulder injuries in handlers who have tried to do this in the past. Canicross is quick with it being possible to do 3 minute miles, and jogging without a sled dog will always seem boring after you try it !
Are you interested in more information about training sled dogs? Then register on here and post a question or leave a comment.
WE ARE NOW TAKING BOOKINGS FOR NEXT YEARS SLED DOG TRAINING TRIPS.
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Only at Highland Wildrides!
07/09/2008 by admin.
Hi there! Bru the Bear here again. I have managed to sneak on here as Mum went out to teach another great lesson for the Wildriders.
Now, you all know how I have little trust for the equine species, but my Mum assures me that there are a great many steady horses in the world. I always took this with a pinch of salt until the other day when I went out on a short trek. Here is a picture of our Lady May with gymnast Micheal Stevenson who had never ridden a real horse before yet oddly assumed they could be used just like the ones you find in the gym! He did a short routine on her culminating in a hand stand and she never even flinched!
I couldn’t help thinking that not only was he lucky that May is a fantastic horse, but also that my Mum didn’t see him doing it!
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Lairg Show Results!
07/09/2008 by admin.
Well we finally did it! We finally took our Wildriders and horses to a show. It was the first show for nearly everyone there - including the horses. It was a great experience that we hope to repeat many times next summer with the best out of our Wildriders getting the opportunity to show and groom at Lairg, and Dornoch as well as our own in house competitions in the Easter and Summer holidays.
So how did they do? Excellent! We were so proud of all the Wildriders as some of them haven’t been riding for long at all, and for our girls who entered into the jumping competitions and had only started jumping recently it was an achievement to even be selected to compete in our name.
We were very proud of Chloe who got a second in jumping, a fifth in her ridden class, and a sixth on Bump in the Thelwell class (apparently she would have been placed higher had Bump not been so well behaved!), and Ella did an amazing job with Pollei who came fourth in her in hand class as she had just ripped a shoe off before entering the ring and barely had any tail left after visiting the stallion!
But the star of the show was our Fairy Gem, Gemma Murray, who has been volunteering at Highland Wildrides over the past few months. On her beautiful, big, grey, horse Mr Murphy, she cleaned up with a first in ridden turn out, a first in their ridden, a second in 
both of her show jumping classes, a third in their in hand class, and got one of the championships (in fact she just narrowly missed the second championship!). On the lead up to the show Gemma had helped us out a great deal by teaching jumping and riding lessons, mentoring the kids in the Wildriders Club in preparation for showing, transporting horses, lending us equipment, and supporting us in the ring - thank you so much Gemma.
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Parelli at the NEC.
07/09/2008 by admin.
At the beginning of August the adult members of the Wildriders Club got together to go and see Linda and Pat Parelli and their amazing horses do a two day exhibition at the NEC.
It was a truly amazing experience that made us feel like we are really right on track with our training methods. As you are probably aware we are very much in favour of natural horsemanship techniques and all our training methods that we have developed are based in horse psychology. We have learnt a lot in the three years that we have been training horses here and not least from the horses themselves. In fact when we learnt about the Parelli’s seven games we realised that our horses had already taught us the first three!
It was great comfort to hear Pat Parelli say things that we have already begun to see and do ourselves. For instance we have already recognised that lunging is not a great way of exercising or teaching a horse, that ground work is so important, nosebands are generally unnecessary, and if you can’t ride a horse in a snaffle - don’t ride it. Pat Parelli says that it has taken him several decades to get to the stage he is at. We can only thank our lucky stars that he has put all his amazing knowledge into nicely packaged DVD’s so that we can save ourselves that time! While we are sure that we would have got similar results in time, it has meant that by applying ourselves to his programme we have got a globally recognised institution behind us that benefits the horses we have now instead of just the ones we would have in thirty years.
It is our aim over time to qualify several adult Wildriders as Parelli Professionals so keep watching this space……………………
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Attention Thursday Night Riders!
20/08/2008 by admin.
Thursday nights lesson has had to be moved to Friday night - I hope that this suits you all.
Midnight Cowgirl
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Congratulations Wildriders!
13/08/2008 by admin.
Well done to all of you who have helped us to complete our ambition to remove all of the ragwort from our pastures. This year we have done an amazing amount of work on the croft; turning fields into paddocks, installing watering systems, increasing our grazing acreage, removing hazards from the fields, killing bracken, removing ragwort, installing new gates and fences, and repairing old ones. Once we have created two more paddocks and divided one big field into two we will have completed the pasture management program for this year well ahead of time, and we are hoping to make a start on next years before the winter. We would like to thank all those who have helped to make this happen and here are some who really deserve a mention……
Elizabeth Munro, Sandi MacLeod, Lucy, Rachel Murray, Ella Wingent, Catherine Mair, Trini Graham-Stewart, Lorna and Francis Hull, Iona Maclean, Kirsty Davies, Lauren Martin, Layla Murray, Little Ella, Sarah Watt, Ryan Turney, and Chloe MacDonald.
If I have forgotten anyone who has helped with the ragworting then please let me know as all of you who have will be starting our points system with a special 10 point thank you gift.
Midnight Cowgirl.
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