Back to Blog Listings

Day 43 - USA to UK

100 days

Having completed the John and Josh Lyons Certification Program in Colorado, USA, it was time to return to the UK, which is where I was living. I founded Equine Perfection (described as a conditioned-response training centre) in 2002 at my property in Kent and began taking horses in for training (mostly starting and retraining), holding clinics and demonstrations as well as travelling the country each weekend to hold clinics.

I was amazed at how well the English ride and soon discovered this was because they had to learn to 'ride through' a lot of potentially dangerous behaviour. I know it's a gross generalisation but it seemed to me that in the USA, if your horse wasn't behaving the way you wanted it to, you sent it out to a trainer to fix it. The same problem in the UK was addressed with a riding instructor as back in those days, the early 2000s, horse trainers were thin on the ground. Sadly riding instructors were ill-equipped to deal with the training side of things and this didn't always bode well for the horse.

It was during those 3 years in the UK that I realised we needed a better solution for both the horse and the owner and so Kandoo Equine was born - teaching YOU to train your horse!

Don't forget to leave me a comment below - are the riding instructors in your country educated to train horses or simply riders?

If you'd like this series delivered directly to your inbox, click here.