Hi, I’m Katie Cunningham. I’m a British Ex-Pat living in Antigua, Guatemala. This cause is for the good of working horses and their owners in rural Guatemala; it’s a story about a simple horse handling program that transpired into something much more…
*** What If we had discovered a ground breaking way to help improve equine welfare and reduce violence and abuse towards horses and humans in rural Guatemala?
*** What If this improvement in welfare and reduction in violence had stemmed from profound shifts in attitude and behaviour of participants whilst taking part in a simple horse handling program?
*** What If we could produce a scientifically disseminated report that demonstrates that the application of this horse handling program helps to changes attitudes and behaviour of its participants? And that these changes lead to improved treatment of working
equines and reduced violence towards horses and humans too?
*** And What If we already had a leading international equine welfare organization interested to hear the results of the research on its completion and discuss how they might be integrated into their existing programmes throughout 11 developing countries
across the globe.
Well, we think we
HAVE found a new way to improve welfare and reduce violence, and we
ARE now about to scientifically evaluate its effectiveness, and we
DO have the world’s leading working equine welfare charity interested in our results!
There are over 100 million working equines (horses, mules and donkeys) in the world today. Mistreatment and violence are problems that these equines and people face on a daily basis.
Working within the framework of Equinos Sanos Para El Pueblo (Healthy Horses for The People), a working equine welfare organization and partner program to the Brooke Hospital for Animals, we have designed a simple horse handling program aimed for horse owners
in rural communities that depend upon the working equine.
In our program our participants, who often mistreat their horses and their family members are guided through both the methods of
Join-Up®, the training system designed by Monty Roberts as well as its message of
non-violence.
Join-Up® is a training system based upon a consistent set of principles using the horse’s inherent methods of communication and herd behaviour.
Join-Up® is all about creating a safe and cooperative environment for our horse; we offer him the chance to flee, interact with him using non-violent body language and communication and develop a relationship based
on mutual trust and respect.
Join-Up® proposes that not just horses, but humans too thrive in a cooperative and safe environment and falter in a climate of fear and submission. And that more can be achieved through non-aggression.
Join Up®shows offers our participants another way to behave and interact with horses and humans.
The embodied experience of Join-Up® allows our participants to discover that violence is never the answer and that more can be achieved without the use of aggression.
Join-Up® guides our participants towards a new sense of non-aggressive leadership
Monty Roberts and Shy Boy
We feel that the program leads to an improvement in physical and psychological equine welfare due to a shift in attitude and behaviour of the participants towards a more rational and considerate care of horses.
We are of the opinion that our participants are discovering a new sense of non-aggression and that they are choosing to adapt the concept of non-violence to their lives with horses and other humans.
We sense that the program is helping to improve leadership, communication and relationships because our participants are discovering a new sense of assertive, calm and peaceful leadership.
What we feel makes this program unique and effective is that our participants make the discovery for themselves that violence is never the answer, the lessons are not learned from information fed to them.
The term embodied experience is based on the notion that profound shifts in our ways of being only happen through actually practicing new ways of acting, speaking and moving our bodies, literally. This learning does not come through reading books,
being taught or having discussions.
During the embodied experience of Join-Up® our participants feel the positive effects of becoming a non-aggressive leader. Join-Up® teaches our participants that they can become calm, considerate and confident leaders without the use of violence, both with
their horses and with the people in their lives.
“My greatest accomplishment was learning to be gentle. Without that, I would have accomplished nothing”.
Monty Roberts
“In violence we forget who we are” - Mary McCarthy
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