At the Arctic Equestrian Games 2010, amongst a multitude of stands displaying various horse equipment and horse trailers, UMB was hard at work promoting a national scale news item.
PhD student Hilde Hauge of Department of Animal and Aquacultural Sciences (IHA) and six UMB students were busy handing out information on the new 3-year Bachelor on Equine Sciences at IHA
“Everyone” was there at Brunstad Conference Center in Tønsberg, which had been transformed from a huge conference center cum exposition hall to an equestrian centre in order to host the 11 day long Arctic Equestrian Games from February 22nd through 28th.
“This is not really an educational event, so the participants do not come here primarily to hear about education”, says Hilde Hauge. “We simply want to make this new Bachelor programme known to all interested parties.” And they managed to do just that. Pamphlets made their way into the hands of many of those who passed their stand, and many more stopped for a chat.
The Bachelor on Equine Sciences is given in Norwegian.
Hilde Hauge
Photo: Janne Brodin
Lack of formal education within the horse industries There are today far too few municipal and county administrators who have a thorough education and understanding of horse related issues. The idea with this Bachelor is to give future advisors to the horse industry in-depth theoretical knowledge of horse breeding, feeding and ethology (behavior). “We hope that a thorough education will help create ventures and projects to develop the horse industry. There is very little in the way of public or government grants and understanding of the work that this industry actually does”, says Hilde.
What do the students get out of this study programme? The aim is that the students acquire practical understanding and be able to use the theory they learn in the field – for example in order to analyse and advise on the feeding of horses in relation to exercise.
Photo: Janne Brodin
Waiting for applications Hilde has received a lot of positive feed-back from the industry: people feel there is a real need for this knowledge, and she is now eagerly awaiting applications for the new Bachelor programme. “Seeing that this is unploughed ground, the qualifications of the students – especially as far as practical experience goes – will be highly influential when fleshing out the details of the educational run, Hilde concluded, while she went on imparting information about the new Bachelor programme and fielding innumerable questions from people dropping by the stand.
