I’m delighted to be starting Season 5 of An Equine Conversation with a returning and very popular past guest, Dr Dorothy Heffernan.

In today’s episode, we catch-up, get an update on Rio, Dorothy’s New Forest pony with Equine Metabolic Syndrome (although, this was recorded back in August 2024, so there’s likely already another update due) and then we get onto today’s topic of how to set everyone up for the best chance of success when introducing a new horse to a herd.

If you’ve not encountered Dorothy before, let me suggest jumping back and listening to Season 3, Episode 8, our first episode with Dorothy to hear more about her horsie origin story.

Dorothy Heffernan:

Dorothy Heffernan, PhD was born and raised in Dublin in the Republic of Ireland, where she was a horse and pony mad child. She moved to Scotland to study psychology and took her love of all things equid with her.

After graduating with a PhD from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, she chose to specialize in equine behavior and has been working as an equine behavior consultant for 17 years, helping people solve behavior challenges with their horses, ponies, donkeys and mules. In 2021, she joined with three other force-free equid trainers to launch Positive Equine Training Scotland, offering support and training to people in Scotland who want to learn about new gentle and compassionate ways of working with their equid friends. Getting to meet and work with a variety of equids, big, small, long and short eared has been Dorothy’s dream all her life, and now she’s living that dream.

As well as teaching and helping with equid behaviour issues, Dorothy supervises research projects for the University of Edinburgh courses in Equine Science and Animal Behaviour & Welfare. She has her own three lovely equid friends who take up either far too much (or not nearly enough) of her time, all trained using force free positive reinforcement methods.

Photo of Dorothy thanks to El Dunlop Photograph, https://www.eldunlop.com/

In this episode we discuss:

1:23 - episode & guest introduction

3:15 - catching-up on what happened since last episode

6:17 - Rio - a brief re-cap on his history

9:40 - the past few months with Rio

19:10 - onto today’s topic - introducing a new horse to the herd

21:01 - where to start

28:01 - the challenges of social skills for those highly domesticated horses

31:43 - post-inhibitory rebound

32:57 - setting up for introduction success

41:24 - quarantine/isolation for the new horse?

46:30 - ‘it depends’ on your unique context

48:10 - where to get support

53:19 - our case study: introducing Affie & Wren to the herd

1:00:52 - wrapping up, further learning with Dorothy & I, and what’s on next week

Links from Dorothy:

• Find Dorothy via her Facebook profile
• Or at Dorothy’s website: Light Touch Equine

Our links mentioned this episode:  

• Sign-up to our email list
• Abbey's Run Equestrian website
• Abbey's Run Equestrian on Facebook

Thank you to Matthew Bliss for podcast production & consultation. If you'd like him to help with your podcast, get in touch by email at [email protected]