Friary Riding Club

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🐴 𝐕𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐍𝐞𝐞𝐝𝐞𝐝 – 𝐃𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐐𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐞𝐫𝐬 🐴

Our Regional Dressage Qualifiers are taking place this Sunday, 26th July in Roscrea, and we're looking for a few extra pairs of hands.

Never volunteered before or not part a member of the AIRC? Don't worry! This is a great opportunity to get involved, learn something new, and support your region. We'll make sure you're shown what to do, so no experience is needed.

📧 Please email [email protected] by 5:00 pm on Thursday if you can help.

Thank you for supporting the West Midlands—we couldn't run these events without our amazing volunteers! 💜

A great chance for those of you who want to get some practice over xc portable fences this weekend without doing a full event 🤩🤩🤩

🐎💥 𝐉𝐔𝐌𝐏 𝐂𝐑𝐎𝐒𝐒 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔 💥🐎

Golden Grove Riding Club is excited to host our Jump Cross event at Roscrea Equestrian Centre on Sunday, 12th July 2026!

✅ Open to all 2026 AIRC members
📍 Roscrea Equestrian Centre (E53 NN63)
📅 12th July 2026
💶 Entry Fee:
• €25 Individual
• €40 Pairs

🎟️ https://itsplainsailing.com/org/goldengrove -71668

So exciting!!!

🐎💥 𝐉𝐔𝐌𝐏 𝐂𝐑𝐎𝐒𝐒 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔 💥🐎

Golden Grove Riding Club is excited to host our Jump Cross event at Roscrea Equestrian Centre on Sunday, 12th July 2026!

✅ Open to all 2026 AIRC members
📍 Roscrea Equestrian Centre (E53 NN63)
📅 12th July 2026
💶 Entry Fee:
• €25 Individual
• €40 Pairs

🎟️ https://itsplainsailing.com/org/goldengrove -71668

🐴 Competition Horse Health: Disease Prevention, Vaccination Protocols & Identification 🐴

Join us for an informative online webinar with Dr Anna Juan, equine veterinarian and Assistant Professor and Academic Clinician in Equine Clinical Studies at the UCD School of Veterinary Medicine.

📅 Date: 29 June 2026
🕢 Time: 7:30pm
💻 Venue: Online Webinar

As horses regularly travel between yards, training venues, and competitions, maintaining strong preventative healthcare practices is essential for protecting equine health, welfare, and performance.

This practical, evidence-based webinar will cover:

✔️ Preventive healthcare and its role in horse welfare and performance
✔️ Biosecurity measures to reduce disease transmission
✔️ Vaccination protocols and competition requirements
✔️ Equine influenza, EHV, strangles, and other contagious diseases
✔️ Horse identification, passports, microchipping, and traceability
✔️ Travel preparation and pre-competition health checks
✔️ Maintaining horse health throughout the competition season

There will also be an opportunity to ask questions and discuss current health issues affecting competition horses.

This webinar will be of particular interest to horse owners, riders, trainers, and anyone involved in the care and management of competition horses.

🔗 Register here: https://airc.ie/competition-horse-health-disease-prevention-vaccination-protocols-identification-webinar/

Recently we did a session on equine nutrition for club members and discussed how horses are not simply grazers but that browsing is an important but forgotten part of their diet - this infographic does a great job of summarising some important info for horse owners

Horses Are Not Grazing Animals… They’re Specialist Browsers

This might be one of the biggest misconceptions in horse management.

We often describe horses as grazing animals, standing with their heads down eating grass all day. While they certainly graze, their natural feeding behaviour is actually far more complex than that.

Wild and feral horses spend huge portions of their day browsing. They don’t just eat grass. They seek out hedgerows, shrubs, leaves, bark, herbs, flowers, seed heads, weeds and even certain tree species. They constantly move across the landscape, selecting different plants to meet different nutritional and behavioural needs.

Think about a horse turned into a field with a healthy hedge line. How often do you see them reaching through the hedge for hawthorn, blackberry, rosehips or fresh leaves rather than standing in the middle eating grass?

That isn’t boredom. It’s natural behaviour.

The irony is that many of our modern horse paddocks bear very little resemblance to the environment horses evolved to live in. Vast areas of single-species grass provide plenty of calories but very little variety.

Much of the UK’s improved pasture has been heavily selected for agricultural productivity, particularly for cattle production. Ryegrass has become a dominant species because it produces high yields and supports milk and meat production extremely efficiently. The problem is that what works brilliantly for a dairy cow doesn’t necessarily work brilliantly for a horse.

Many improved ryegrass pastures contain significantly higher levels of readily available sugars than the diverse meadow systems horses would naturally encounter. Yet we continue to place animals designed to browse a wide variety of plants onto fields dominated by a single, energy-dense grass species.

Then we scratch our heads and wonder why we are seeing increasing numbers of horses struggling with obesity, insulin dysregulation, laminitis and other metabolic disorders.

Of course, metabolic disease is multifactorial. Genetics, exercise, management and overall diet all play a role. But it does raise an interesting question:

Are we feeding horses in a way that matches millions of years of evolution?

Browsing provides:

🌿 Nutritional diversity
🌿 Natural enrichment
🌿 Increased movement
🌿 Mental stimulation
🌿 Opportunities for self-selection of plant material
🌿 Access to a wide range of plant compounds not found in monoculture grass systems

Perhaps the question shouldn’t be “How much grass does my horse need?”

Perhaps it should be “How much variety does my horse need?”

Because when given the choice, many horses don’t behave like lawnmowers.

They behave exactly as nature intended — as specialist browsers.

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Entries close Thursday, the 7th of May at 12 noon. 🥳

📅 6th & 7th June
📍 Mullingar Equestrian Centre

You can find more information on the website at this link - https://airc.ie/airc-rcf-2026/