I love coming across new equine education possibilities online! HEART Equine Academy offer online equine courses. Now HEART stands for Happy Equines: Applicable and Relevant Teaching. Don’t you love that? I do! And I hope to profile one or two people from this equine education setup in the near future. Stay tuned!

HEART Equine Academy is an online place where you can go to further your equine education. The instructors are made up of “positive, experienced horse people from around the world.” They offer courses and tips in equine care, competing horses, photography and even art. You will find different courses on offer over terms of the year.

HEART Equine Academy

You can find out about their current courses that start October 15 as well as previous courses. They are aptly named!

• Be Brave! An online course that runs for 6 weeks, focusing on confidence with and around horses.
• Drawn to Horses. This is a course that focuses on creating portraits of horses.
• Horses in Focus. Want to be an equine photographer? This course may be for you!

As it states on the HEART Equine Academy website, their focus is on developing equine excellence.

“…we understand “equine excellence” to mean developing a deeper relationship with your horse. To do that we all need more knowledge. Learning never stops! Plus, it’s fun :-)”

Instructors for these courses include an educator who focuses on counselling and dressage, an experienced designer and photographer who loves horses as well as a scientist who focuses on the relationship between humans and their animals with a focus on behaviour.

There is also a Certificate Equine Massage Therapist, a professional equine artist who breeds as well as trains horses and finally an instructor who has a bachelor in biochemistry and a Master Herbalist diploma. What a line-up!

You may be interested to see previous courses they’ve run on their courses page and also keep in touch with their Facebook page to find out about future courses. With the vast knowledge and skills their instructors offer, it looks like many courses could be provided in the future!

If you have a love for the racing industry and an interest in pharmaceuticals, then you may be interested to learn about the AORC.  This is the Association of Official Racing Chemists. Back in 1911 in Austria, racing authorities were questioning if some horses were competing under the influence of drugs. This then led to the engagement of a Viennese chemist named Dr. Frankel.  This was to determine a method of detection to ascertain if this was so. These procedures then went on a year later to be utilised in France and England.

I know in Australia that horses are tested for drugs randomly at racetracks. It was in 1941 that several racing chemists came together to discuss issues collaboratively. In 1947, this group had expanded and then officially became known as the Association of Official Racing Chemists.

As it states on their site:

“The membership of the AORC consists of individuals, not laboratories, and is limited to those concerned with the detection of drugs in racing animals. The scope of each operation is defined by the drug control measures of the rules of racing in each jurisdiction served. From the inception of the AORC, its membership has been international. As the AORC is a member of the ARCI (Association of Racing Commissioners International), annual meetings are held in conjunction with other industry segments alternating every other year to an international venue.”

The Association of Official Racing Chemists

There are now more than 100 members covering 26 countries around the world. They work to bring quality drug testing to the horse racing industry.

“Drug testing has emerged from its primitive beginnings to become a very precise and sensitive science.”

This association may be of interest to you.  Especially if you have a particular interest for the science of pharmaceuticals and want to help keep racing a sport with integrity!