ABOUT RHONI
The first thing I ever said was “Where’s Horsey?” - presumably meaning the stuffed pony my mother’s bridesmaid gave me when I was born. I don’t think my mum ever forgave her.
Horseward is the result of my lifelong obsession with natural horse care and nutrition.
I balanced my first ration in 1981, the year I bred my first foal and passed my BHSAI. I wasn’t from a horsy background and really had no peers or mentors so a lot of my knowledge was gleaned from reading, and a whole lot of trial and error (particularly the latter!) so I evolved as a horsewoman without any particular set of entrenched rules or traditions.
Did I say I was a bit obsessive? My fellow Philosophy undergraduates used my essays as study notes.
I met Dick Francis when I was working at the BBC. His parting shot was, “My dear, you know my books better than I do!”
And when I was researching a documentary about Britain’s involvement in the development of the atom bomb, the Prof of nuclear history at Manchester Uni (I presume tongue in cheek) offered me a place to do a PhD on the basis that “you have a better grasp of this material than any of my Postgraduates!” I had been researching it for about ten days. If I sound unbearable, I probably was. My saving grace was I really didn’t care. I only cared about horses, and their care.
I've lived through the processed feed revolution and have watched the horse feed business change into an industry that promotes agri-industrial byproducts as healthy options. I've observed an explosion of chronic metabolic and inflammatory "diseases of affluence" in the equine population, very much mirroring the human health crisis in first world populations. As a career researcher, I couldn’t help myself. I had to find out why. As you might imagine, it's not all black and white!
I inescapably came to the realisation that whole foods are an awful lot more than the sum of their parts and that no plant, whether fruit, vegetable, herb or spice, with milennia of safe medical use in traditional systems, can be reduced to a set of components - however hard drug and nutrition companies might try to make it so (or to convince us that they have in fact done so!)
So, having brought my critical faculties to bear on what my horses were eating and how their healthcare was addressed, inevitably but almost by accident I became involved in rehabbing horses, both physically and mentally. A huge amount can be achieved to "fix" difficult and dangerous behaviours by simply letting the horse actually be a horse and amending its diet. This is often simply a matter of removing the processed component of their diet and not keeping them stabled. However, I started to experiment with herbs, borrowing heavily from traditional medicinal systems that have been proven in use over many centuries.
Along the way I found a number of key natural ingredients which were enormously helpful in almost every scenario that involved stress, injury and systemic disfunction. I started to make sure that I always had a stock of them in my medicine cabinet. The more I became aware of the side effects of prescribed medicines, alongside an appreciation of the efficacy of herbal remedies, the more inclined I was to seek out less compromised solutions.
The products we offer on this website are blends of certified Organic herbs that I have used successfully for many years to help Horseward horses. I'm proud to share them with you!
