I was worried about putting colic in the title of this episode. I thought that might scare some people off. It can be such a sad subject. So many of us have either lost horses to colic or known friends who have. Colic can come on so fast and it is so very painful. It isn’t like a long illness where there is time to prepare and time to say good-bye. When a horse survives a bout of colic, there is always a fear that there will be another one. So this is a heavy topic.

We didn’t start off wanting to talk about colic. Originally Dominique and I thought we needed to shift gears a bit after so many podcasts that drew on academic research to talk about lighter subjects. The best laid plans and all that.

Dominique had a list of topics that she wanted to talk about that came from discussions in my new on-line clinics.

We began by talking about the connections that emerge with our horses through this training. They don’t want to leave us. They stay engaged with us in the training game. That’s where we began and suddenly we were talking about colic. It was one of those conversations where I had to stop and think - how did we get here? There is a connection with connection.

So we are talking about colic in this episode, and then to lighten things up, we talk about an essential piece of our clicker training equipment - treat pouches and vests.