C Horses

07/09/2026

🐴 What could your therapeutic practice look like outside the consulting room?

For qualified mental health professionals, horses can offer a different therapeutic approach that support clients who don't always respond well to the conventional treatments.

EATA’s Equine Assisted Mental Health (EAMH) course is designed to teach experienced practitioners how to safely and ethically integrate horses in their practice. 🌿

Delivered over 10 months, the EAMH course combines both online and face-to-face learning with nationally recognised training in animal-assisted services and equine handling.

You’ll learn how to:

🌿 Design and facilitate equine-assisted sessions around individual therapeutic goals
🐴 Understand equine behaviour, communication, stress responses and boundaries
🌿 Bring your existing therapeutic modalities into an equine-assisted setting
🐴 Support safe, choice-based interactions between clients and horses
🌿 Strengthen your own self-awareness, confidence and reflective practice

2027 EAMH Intakes

📍 Sunshine Coast, QLD – commencing February 8, 2027
📍 Galston, NSW – commencing February 8, 2027

Ready to explore where your practice could go next? 🐴🌿

📩 Get in touch with our team to learn more about eligibility and our 2027 EAMH intakes.

20/08/2026

Equine Assisted Therapy Myth-busting
Part 1.

Let’s retire the tired old trope of horses as prey animals as validation of their effectiveness as therapy partners.

The equine assisted psychotherapy and counselling field continues to grow, and I’ve been privileged to witness and play a small part in its evolution over the past 15 years. But there are some unproductive myths and pseudoscience that persist. One of these is that horses are prey animals, who constantly live in fear of their lives, and that this is somehow beneficial to traumatised people.

Equines, particularly domestic horses, at one time might have been “prey”, but even back on the grassy plains, they still spent far more time in seeking and social states rather than in a fight or flight fear state. This is supported by the literature over the past decade which increasingly treats horses as highly social, affiliative animals whose evolved sociality transcends their “prey” status. It’s their generous relational ability and curiosity that makes horses such wonderful therapeutic partners, which is why it’s frustrating to see the “horses are prey animals and this is why it works” fallacy continuing in some corners.

Perpetuating the misplaced belief that horses exist in a state of fear is not only incorrect, it is incompatible with modern horse welfare standards, particularly their mental/emotional state. Working with horses who are dysregulated, or in a faux window of tolerance, simply to benefit humans, is wrong on many dimensions. It’s unethical to expose stressed horses to dysregulated people, and it’s unethical - and even dangerous - to introduce vulnerable people to horses living in a state of fear (flight, fight or freeze).

That’s why we advocate very strongly for equine welfare and wellbeing - in the therapy space and beyond. It’s why we only work with horses who are physically and mentally healthy - not in pain, or frightened. This means they’re confident, aware, and able to re-regulate their own nervous systems, and it’s a state of being that we want to encourage for our clients. This physiology of intersubjectivity, attachment and attunement, and the coregulation between horse and human is where growth and change happens. And the results in the therapy and learning space are profound.

If you’re interested in the evolution of our understanding of horses and humans, particularly the demystifying the prey trope, here’s some further reading:

Tomlinson, M. (2024). Emotional natives: The role of prey-animal ontologies in equine-assisted personal development. Society & Animals, 34(1), 3–23. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685306-bja10191

Birke, L. (2008). Talking about horses: Control and freedom in the world of “natural horsemanship.” Society & Animals, 16(2), 107–126. https://doi.org/10.1163/156853008x291417

Tom, E. (2015). Gender and power in narratives of “Natural Horsemanship.” Humanimalia, 7(1), 59–78. https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.9982

Torres Borda, L., Auer, U., & Jenner, F. (2023). Equine social behaviour: Love, war and tolerance. Animals, 13(9), 1473. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani13091473

Torres Borda, L., Roth, P. M., & Lumetzberger, J. (2024). Proximity tracking using ultra-wideband technology for equine social behaviour research. Scientific Reports, 14(1), 60805. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-60805-0

Wolter, R., Stefanski, V., & Krueger, K. (2018). Parameters for the analysis of social bonds in horses. Animals, 8(11), 191. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani8110191

Starling, M., McLean, A. N., & McGreevy, P. (2016). The contribution of equitation science to minimising horse-related risks to humans. Animals, 6(3), 15. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani6030015

29/07/2026

Our Equine Assisted Therapy & Grief Support workshop now has both ACA and PACFA OPD endorsement.

17/07/2026

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What if horses are gathering information that we can't even perceive?

🐴 In equine-assisted mental health, we often focus on what horses teach us about ourselves. But just as importantly, we need to understand how they experience the world.

One of the most remarkable, and often overlooked, parts of a horse's sensory world is their sense of smell.

Scientific research shows that horses possess a highly developed sense of smell, using it to explore their environment, recognise other horses and familiar humans, and gather important social information.

More recently, a 2026 PLOS ONE study explored how horses respond to human chemosignals associated with emotional states.

Researchers collected sweat samples from volunteers while they watched horror videos to induce fear, and humorous videos to induce joy.

Horses exposed to the fear-related odours showed increased vigilance, stronger startle responses and reduced interaction with people compared with horses exposed to joy-related odours or a control scent.

These findings remind us that horses are continuously gathering information and often detecting sensory cues that are beyond our own.

🐴 And then there's The Flehmen Response...

That distinctive lip curl isn't a smile!

When horses curl their upper lip and inhale, they are performing the flehmen response.

This draws scent molecules into the vomeronasal organ (VNO), a specialised sensory organ that helps detect pheromones and other chemical signals.

This sophisticated sense of smell gives horses access to information about other horses and their environment, which plays an important role in communication, reproduction and survival.

🧠🐴By understanding equine ethology and remaining curious about what a horse might be perceiving - especially when we enter their environment - we are better equipped to support their welfare and build meaningful human-horse interactions.

06/07/2026

PACFA - Endorsed Professional Development: Grief Support in Equine Assisted Therapy

Modern grief counselling prioritizes integration over closure — helping clients adapt to and live meaningfully alongside their loss. This workshop centres the therapeutic relationship as the foundation for change, supporting practitioners to help clients explore, regulate, and respond to the physical effects of grief and stress, which so often appear in the body
before they can be expressed in words.

HOSTED BY: C Horses, Galston NSW
WHEN: Oct 17–18, 2026
INVESTMENT: $600 + GST
CAPACITY: 14 places max - booking out quickly!

WHAT IS IT?

A 10-hour professional development workshop for equine assisted mental health practitioners and students. Deepen your skills and develop a specialised approach to help clients process bereavement and life transitions.

ABOUT THE WORKSHOP

Part 1 — Saturday 17 October, 10am–3pm
Understanding grief & loss, and the role of adaptable counselling frameworks that respect an individual’s unique grieving process.
Part 2 — Sunday 18 October, 10am–3pm
Dynamic, hands-on practical facilitation deepening your understanding of adaptable counselling frameworks that respect an individual’s unique grieving process.

YOUR FACILITATORS

Kimberly Warner
A thanatologist — specialist in the scientific and humanistic study of death, dying, and bereavement. Founder of Mane Support, a Tennessee-based nonprofit providing equine-assisted grief counselling and support.

Dr. Joanne Shannon
A psychiatrist incorporating evidence-based therapies to help patients find their own pathway to recovery. Also, a veterinary surgeon and equine-assisted therapy practitioner, experienced in supporting medical professionals and first responders through traumatic grief.

Camilla Mowbray
Registered clinical counsellor & psychotherapist and EATA educator. Specialises in equine-assisted therapy, EMDR, DBT, and trauma therapy across the lifespan, in a supportive, sensory-rich environment.

06/07/2026

Professional Development Workshop
IFS with Equine Engagement with a focus on Memory Reconsolidation
with Jenn Pagone at C Horses, Galston, NSW

24th-26th September 2026 (Thurs-Sat)
Day 1: 12pm-4pm
Day 2: 9am-4pm
Day 3: 9am-4pm

Jenn Pagone is the creator of Equid-Nexus®, a model based upon Internal Family Systems (IFS) and EMDR with a focus on memory reconsolidation for healing relational trauma

This is an experiential training, and participants will be working with their own internal systems. Each day of the workshop will be a unique robust learning experience from the inside out and will flow organically as sessions unfold.

Participants and auditors will learn the model through didactics, herd observations, demonstrations, and small group processing. Participants will be working with the horses throughout the three days while auditors will be observing those who are working with the horses directly.

You will learn:
The Equid-Nexus Model’s Scaffolding Steps.
How to work with clients’ parts and integrate the horse into the IFS process.
How to identify and support conditions for memory reconsolidation.
Embodying the self-led horsemanship perspective to become a self-led facilitator.

Jenn is advanced trained and certified in IFS (Level 3), EMDR, and IFS-informed EMDR. She serves as a trainer with the IFS Institute and is an approved consultant for all three organizations. She is also a certified Trauma Recovery Coach with the International Association of Trauma Recovery Coaching.

Jenn is dual certified as a practitioner and equine professional with the Natural Lifemanship Institute and served as an NL trainer from 2020-2024. Her specializations include women with complex relational trauma, medical trauma, eating disorders, somatization disorders, grief and loss, and cancer diagnoses. Believing that “the personal is the professional”, Jenn loves to foster other professionals' growth and learning and walk beside them on their journeys towards healing and secure attachment with themselves and others.

Register at Equid-Nexus.com
https://pci.jotform.com/form/260028410215139
Participation Fee: $900 AUD (9 spaces)
Auditor Fee: $600 AUD (9 spaces)
Contact Jenn: [email protected]

03/07/2026

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21/06/2026

Please book here: https://MyCHorsesBooking.as.me/EquineAssistedGriefAndLossCPD

18/06/2026

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Did you know? Not everyone working with animals is qualified to provide Animal-Assisted Therapy (AAT).

While animals can have a naturally calming, comforting, and therapeutic presence, they are not the therapists.

Animal-Assisted Therapy is a goal-directed clinical intervention that must be delivered by a suitably qualified and registered health professional working within their scope of practice.

This may include psychologists, occupational therapists, speech pathologists, physiotherapists, social workers, and other registered health professionals who are providing treatment and working alongside an animal as part of the therapeutic process.

The animal plays an important role in supporting engagement, motivation, and therapeutic outcomes, but the assessment, treatment planning, clinical reasoning, and delivery of therapy are the responsibility of the qualified professional.

Simply spending time with an animal can be beneficial—but that alone does not make it therapy.

Understanding the difference helps protect clients, maintain professional standards, and ensure that people receive safe, ethical, and evidence-informed care.