Calm Healthy Horses - Jenny Paterson

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Welcome to the Calm Healthy Horses Website!

Hi I'm Jenny. The purpose of this website is to help you understand what is going on with your horse. If your horse is anything but calm and healthy then a good place to start your investigations should be the diet.

The number of health and behaviour issues that are caused by what horses eat is unbelievable! Most of the reveal how a lot of time and money was spent on investigations and treatments that did not address the true cause.

When I started out my Horsemanship career I thought that when horses had problems they were really 'people' problems. Therefore teaching people good horsemanship would fix the problems. However, having met numerous riders and their 'problem' horses over the fifteen years I have been teaching, I now realise this is not always the case.

   - aggressive
   - doesn't want to be touched
   - excessively herd-bound
   - spooky
   - lethargic, 'no go!'

There have been horses come along to lessons that were perfectly OK eight weeks ago at the last lessons but something has changed in between. I now know this was caused by a change in the grass! When you read you will see how mineral imbalances, mycotoxins, sugars/fructans/fibre content, phytoestrogens and photodynamic pigments ALL affect your horse's health and temperament!

Please go to and see how many signs your horse really has. Some are so common people think they are normal. Some cause horses to become dangerous to be around let alone ride. Which brings up an important point. If your horse doesn't seem 'right' then don't get on!! (Read ) You will learn in just HOW the weather causes changes in the grass, which grasses to avoid and which grasses to sow, and how to manage these grasses so that they stay horse friendly.

You cannot judge a horse's temperament while his diet contains green, growing grass especially if it is fertilised rye/grass & clover

For the last 5 years this subject has been the focus of my life. By taking on some of the worst case horses and deliberately NOT working on them or using any other 'treatments', they have come back to normal with diet changes alone!

From all manner of 'bad' behaviours to saddle-fitting difficulties to head-flickers. From horses and ponies prone to sore feet and laminitis to those who have had difficulty keeping weight on. There's no better proof than that. HOW SIMPLE!!! Making the recommended changes is so worthwhile. You will get to see your horse's true personality, have a calm, contented horse you can enjoy riding for many years to come.

Jenny Paterson, B.Sc.

The horse's diet and how it directly affects his health and behaviour has, in recent years, completely taken over my life! Fortunately it has been an exceptionally rewarding journey.

All my life I have ridden and owned horses, competing in both English and Western shows. Years ago nobody had any idea how much influence diet has on a horse's temperament. We put 'bad' behaviours down to the horse's nature. We were guilty of using certain adjectives to describe various types of horses: nutty, sensitive, has attitude, arrogant, bolshy, spooky, naughty...the list was endless.

Back in 1995 I attended a Parelli Natural Horsemanship Clinic with Ken Faulkner and became inspired by the approach. I arranged quite a few clinics for Ken and made the most out of extra private lessons whenever he was over. Soon I had passed Advanced Level 2 and then Level 3 and became an Instructor.

This is how I started on my teaching career but I have since moved on to learn from wonderful horsemen like Ray Hunt, Tom and Bill Dorrance, Buck Brannaman and Dr. Deb Bennett, the latter two having both been out to New Zealand multiple times to help us all to further our horsemanship skills.

I soon gained a wonderful clientele throughout New Zealand and would give lessons in various areas about every two months. For many years I was meeting ten to fifteen horses every weekend. Lots of people were regulars and I got to know them and their horses pretty well. Other people brought their horses along to solve various problems they were having at the time.

Consequently, I found myself 'at the coal face' of all the health and behaviour issues people were experiencing with their horses. During lessons people would learn good horsemanship skills and a lot of good work went into their horses. Yet in many cases the expected progress was not being made. Sometimes, horses which had been fabulous at the previous lessons, seemed to have undergone a personality change, becoming cranky or touchy or spooky for no apparent reason.

Some people brought along horses who were agitated, lathered, mental wrecks and we hadn't even started. Horses who screamed out for their friends who were only five yards away, horses who had spooked violently or bucked or become aggressive to their owner, horses who flinched when touched or couldn't bear to be touched at all, horses whose owners were on a never ending saddle-fitting mission, claustrophobic horses, horses that would be always 'running off', were difficult to bend in any way, who had started , become ear-shy and so on. It was frustrating for lots of owners and at times hard to make any real progress.

Then there were the horses owned by my good friends and I. Beautiful, talented horses that would end up 'no good' for one reason or another. The more I came to understand horses the more I realised how innocent they were! They are no way 'nutty', 'pigs' or 'mongrels' by nature. All they really want, as Tom Dorrance said, "Is to just get along." How wrong of us to put the blame on them. And it used to constantly cross my mind that whilst a lot of people may not be that good with horses, they are nowhere near bad enough either, to cause the sorts of uncharacteristic behaviours their horses were presenting. There was a lot that just didn't make sense.

2004 turned out to be a tough year. I lost my younger sister, Tracey, to breast cancer and not long after, lost my best horse to 'out of the blue' colic. If there was a positive to come out of these sad events it is that they launched me off into the study of nutrients and the part that diet has to play in determining the health and behaviour of our precious horses.

Over the last five years my understanding of how grass, sugars, toxins and mineral imbalances affect our horses has come along in leaps and bounds. Being acquainted with a large number of horse owners and equally as many problem horses, I was able to do a lot of 'testing in the field' of various possible solutions and evaluate all the feedback.

I conducted my own 'Equine Health and Behaviour Survey', spent hundreds of hours reading and talking to horse people, nutritionists and scientists. It has been a 'one thing leads to another learning curve' and happily, to date, judging by the results, most of the puzzle is solved.

I have toured New Zealand several times over the last few years giving evening presentations which lay out this invaluable information so that horse owners can figure out what has been going on with their horses. They can then make the simple changes in management that we recommend which enable them to have calm, healthy horses they can enjoy.

Once the was launched, enquiries from Australia increased. One of these calls happened to come shortly before I was due to fly to Melbourne and I had a spare day. was on a mission to solve the mysterious health issues she had been experiencing with her horses, so we met up.

We soon discovered that we were both on exactly the same wavelength. Since Lucy was looking for a new business challenge, it fitted perfectly for her to become the Australian distributor for ProVide It. This has turned out to be an excellent arrangement and we are now working together to help horsey people all over Australia to achieve the same goal: calm, healthy horses.