On 13th December 2009 Vanessa Bee, entrepreneur and horsewoman, wondered if there was such a thing as dog agility for horses. She was amazed to find that when she Googled the words ‘Horse Agility’ nothing came up – so she decided to do something about it.
Fast forward to 2019 and there are now over 140,000 sites promoting horse agility world wide.
‘It was never meant to be like this!’ says Vanessa, ‘I started slowly, thinking it would just be a bit of local fun, but has taken over my life. It’s still great fun but on a huge scale. We now have thousands of members all over the world.’
But what is Horse Agility?
It’s simply a way of working with horses over obstacles without riding them, this can be done on a lead rein or with the horse working loose, at liberty. Many people still want to compete even though they themselves cannot ride or their equine is unable to be ridden.
The Club has developed graded, competitive courses for horses and people of all abilities, from those who can only walk to those who want to move at the gallop. Most people compete by video, entries coming from remote islands, the Australian outback and from those who simply don’t want to travel.
The courses are designed to help people how to safely work with horses from the ground but there is also a ten level Certificate course for those who feel competition is not for them.
The first few years were not easy, as Vanessa says,
‘We were constantly told that horses weren’t able to do agility like dogs and that ordinary people weren’t able to train their horses to complete set courses but very quickly we proved them wrong.’
With it’s growing membership, new ideas and constantly evolving courses and training plans The Horse Agility Club started a revolution in horsemanship and will continue to be at the forefront of having fun with horses from the ground.
