My Jule was a mare marked “black, broad, strong, fast.” I wanted to fulfill my dream of having my own foal and had found a suitable father in the delightful Welsh-Cob stallion Balou. I thought it was very romantic that for a while we were together on the road. Freya was born in June 2004, our son in July. So I had little capacity for the foals. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the sight of the growing youngsters and their mothers in the meadow. Freya proved to be a lot more nervous than Frieda, even though she was weaned at the age of one year. I even had to clickertrain her to let me touch her legs, because she used to jerk and pull away. I wouldn’t do that anymore today, but back then, she got the nickname “Hysterica”. Of course, I trained her, but I preferred Frieda – she was easier to ride and handle, more human oriented. Then came Horse Agility, and Freya developed real speed. With a lot of nerve training I made her fit for performances and I am always grateful for this new kind of bonding, which would never have been created without Frieda’s refusal to participate in fairs. Doing Agi with her feels like driving a Porsche.

Since you cannot let a foal grow up alone among adults and my original plans with the mare of a friend had come to nothing, I urgently needed a second foal. So Frieda came to us, and her mother was picked up by the owner when she was 6 months old. Of course it was clear from the very first, that she would stay with us. I started her with a mixture of negative and positive reinforcement and, of course, I did a lot of clicker training with her. After we had moved to Ochtmannien I focused more and more on her, dreaming of informing the public about the great possibilities of clicker training. She developed a real talent for difficult balancing acts and grew into “Mrs. Body Awareness”, being able to balance on the narrowest and most shaky surfaces. Unfortunately then, luckily from today’s perspective, the trade shows and fairs were not for her. Luckily, because otherwise Freya would never have been able to show me her strengths. Today, she is my pride and joy as an Agi horse, and thrills my course participants with her enthusiastic motivation in training. She has also made many people feel the effects of the horse’s rockers and other therapy and training equipment, carrying them on her back.

When I bought Amadeus (1997) back in 2008 at the age of 11, I was already his fifth owner. A few years ago an ex-owner found me on Youtube, and she told me how mercilessly he had bucked her off. He did his job as a children’s pony well for me, but without any passion. Every week I walked with him and Jule and several children the distance of three kilometers from the kindergarten to our farm. With time, however, he turned and fled when I came with his halter and the children. Whenever I fetched him for a clicker session, he came to me immediately. Fortunately, our son lost interest in riding quite soon, and so I tried out all sorts of things with him during training. Especially adapting the tasks from the chicken modules with him proved to be real eye-openers, and were so much fun. On our second Equitana 2013 he came along as moral support for Frieda so that she could cope better with the stress of the fair. He did such a great job that the decision was easy: “Here we have a new horse for gigs! Since then he has been coming to all events. He is amazing, and will perform 100% under any circumstances. In the group he is rather a loner who does his own thing. Sometimes he walks on a completely different corner of the paddock trail, far away from the herd, and shows us where we should improve the fences. When it comes to cuddling, he is the greatest connoisseur of my group.

Of course a Shetty can live a good life with bigger ponies, but I wanted a buddy for Amadeus in 2014. My three mares have never been too keen to play. The internet didn’t bring any suitable results, but I heard about a Shetty gelding, who could not be touched and scratched himself severely on tail and mane. And looked very sweet indeed. So Wolfgang (2010) came to us. I was able to train him to accept human touch in no time at all, he responded very well to the clicker, but displayed fear and aggression. In my eyes, his main job was “be a good buddy for Amadeus”, and I limited his training to the husbandry routines. In 2017 I was forced to put my old mare Jule down, and on the very next day Wolfgang developed laminitis, as if he tried to say: “So, now it’s my turn”. Fortunately, he recovered relatively quickly, but was constantly struggling with his metabolism. Since my great veterinarian also offers constellation work for animals, we found out that Wolfgang deeply desired to have “something of his vown”. Triggered by another burst of liminitis, I started to train him on a regular basis. In this short time he transformed himself into a veritable True Horse Agility professional and enriched the training on the horse rockers with his beautiful levade. He never ceases to amaze me with his commitment.