Opportunities for young people to learn to ride and care for horses are becoming rarer as insurance and running costs increase. Once a popular hobby, horse riding is becoming harder to access.
Opportunities to learn to ride are hard to come by but Equine Assist Services offers horse riding for all ages and abilities. Photo: Brooke Williams
Jo Drake often watches her granddaughter Amelia ride in her weekly lessons at Highview Horse Complex near Warrnambool. She says learning to ride has increased Amelia’s confidence and introduced her to new friends. “It offers an alternative, often in the country you miss out on a lot of opportunities,” she says.
Natalie Monaghan at Equine Assist Services is ensuring that the next generation of young riders are coming through. She caters for people of all ages, giving them the chance to learn to care for and ride horses.
Monaghan has been volunteering at Riding for the Disabled (RDA) since 2017 and the progression from that to starting her own riding school seemed a natural one – she had a reliable supply of horses and a way with riders of all ages. “They are a really diverse range,” says Monaghan of her students. “Our youngest is four and our oldest would be in her 70s.”
“We get some that filter through from RDA or some from Equine Facilitated Learning that we’ve done and they come into our mainstream classes as well. Also, we get adults that for whatever reason need to build up their confidence or just have been out of riding for many years and want to find their balance again. Or just want to really spend time with horses, we get a lot of that.”
Monaghan says there are not as many riders joining pony clubs as there use to be.
“Since we’ve been operating, we’ve found that a lot of our little riders have gone on to get their own little ponies, which is fantastic, we love it. It does us out of business, but we love it,” she says. Some of the children also go on to employment in the horse industry.
This is a particularly special set up because many of the horses used in the riding school were also bred by Monaghan. During her work with RDA, Monaghan found that suitable horses were near impossible to source. “I found it very difficult to purchase horses that were safe, reliable, consistent and tolerant. We got the idea that we were going to start breeding them ourselves, particularly for RDA, so that was almost 10 years ago,” she says.
“We are starting to see some of our young crop of horses coming through, and they are the better ones to use in our riding school.”
The word has got out and these horses bred by Monaghan are now becoming sought by other riding schools.
Monaghan’s partner Gary Paton is also involved in the breeding and training of these young horses and praises their temperaments as riding school mounts. “They’re good walk, trot horses and they’ve got calm natures,” he says.
