For the second year Tasracing's Off the Track program will be presenting in the highlighted Equine area at Agfest from May 2 – 4.
Off the Track coordinator Fiona Dearing is delighted to be presenting an enlarged education program.
This year we'll be showing horses, both standardbreds and thoroughbreds, as they present directly from racing and as seasoned performance horses across popular equine sports.
Fiona Dearing
"We'll be covering topics including transitioning a horse from racehorse to pleasure horse nutritionally, how to handle behaviours from a horse directly off the track, improving a standardbreds canter and more."
The Tasracing Off the Track program welcomes two guest presenters for Agfest, Kathleen Mullan and Dr Tim Kempton.
Kathleen Mullan is Harness Racing Australia's welfare officer. Kathleen comes from a strong harness racing family and has shown some truly beautiful standardbreds over the years. Recently she transformed the 113 start Savesometimetodream from racehorse to show horse.
Less than eight months from his last start 'Buck' won the HERO series final at the 2019 VAS Saddle Horse Championships.
Shortly after he also won Best on Show and Supreme Ridden Standardbred at the 2019 SPPHAV State Championships. As recently as this weekend Kathleen has had an incredibly successful EA Southern Cross Show Horse Spectacular in Sydney with her beautiful thoroughbred mare Divinity.
Dr Tim Kempton is the founder of Stance Equitec. He has a Bachelor in Rural Science and a Ph.D. in Nutritional Biochemistry. During his career as a research scientist, Dr Tim questioned the logic of feeding horses a high grain diet, particularly when seeing hot and fizzy behaviour in competition horses.
His research led him to investigate the effects of high starch diets on horse behaviour and performance and to evaluate other feeds including rice bran and coconut meal.
Dr Tim will be presenting on transferring an equine from a racehorse diet to a pleasure / competition horse diet and how to ensure your horse is getting the best nutrition it can for the work it does. When not presenting in the Tasracing round yard Dr Tim will be available for private consultations by appointment.