Understanding Horses: Plan Your Own Stable (Self Paced)

🐴 Learn all about how to care for horses through designing a map of your dream stable and farm! This class is centered on the idea of species appropriate living conditions: understanding how horses live in nature, to ensure we're creating environments that offer the kinds of choices they would make for themselves. 


🕰️ The course should take a total of 60-90 minutes to work through, between reviewing the material and the time spent illustrating the farm. Learners can repeat the class material to make multiple maps. 

We will explore questions like: 
- What is important to horses?
- What and how do horses need to eat?
- What kind of environments can cause horses stress and what kinds keep them feeling safe?
- Do they like to live alone or near other horses?
- What kind of environment is interesting to horses? 
- What kinds of spaces do we need to work with them in different ways (riding, ground work, nature-time)?


1️⃣ First, we'll set up our maps and introduce a framework for basic needs of horses: talking about what species appropriate living conditions means, looking at the meaning of "forage, freedom, and friends," and introducing three categories of needs (biological, social, and cognitive). The introduction contains about 15 minutes of targeted recorded material. 

2️⃣ Through five steps we will explore the biological, social, and cognitive needs of horses and how they can apply to choices about horsekeeping. As we go, we will add various important elements to our farm/stable design, and make decisions about how to set things up to keep horses healthy and happy! We will look at the meaning of "forage, friends, and freedom" to understand what matters most to horses. Each step has 2-5 minutes of video explanation on the concept and what to add.