Course News 14th - 20th September 2009
First Year Trainees
Each morning the first year trainees are working alongside Kildangan staff assisting with breaking yearlings. On Monday evening they had an equine health workshop with Don Collins MRCVS in the main yard at Kildangan stud. The following afternoon they visited the Irish National Stud at Tully, Kildare. They visited the horse museum and went to see some horses including the stallions and the weanling half brother to Derby Winner, Sea The Stars.
On Wednesday evening they visited the Curragh training grounds where they met with Pat Kelly, manager of the training grounds. Pat gave them a tour of the training facilities and spoke to them about the different training surfaces, the problems associated with some of them, maintenance of the surfaces, and some of the advantages of certain types of track over others. Each member of the group learned something new from the tour and the discussion with Pat.
On Friday morning the trainees made the trip to UCD to continue their Anatomy, Physiology and Reproduction module. The Annual Kildangan Stud Pony Sale took place on Friday afternoon at the stud. This is an event at which the foals of the Kildangan nurse mares are sold by auction to Kildangan staff members. This year the sale was run exclusively by the Darley Flying Start trainees. They did a fantastic job, excelling in a variety of areas from organisational skills, auctioneering, bid spotting to catching the pony foals in the paddock before the sale!
Second Year Trainees
The second years continued their rotation work placements at Darley, Kelvinside, and Scone Veterinary Hosptial Intensive Care Unit (Clovelly) in the mornings and their Equine Nursing module at TAFE in the afternoons.
Clodagh Kavanagh visited the trainees this week. She met them all individually for their trainee reviews and discussed their goals for the Australian leg of the course and options for their four week work placements in November. The trainees joined Clodagh and Darley management for dinner at the Belmore Hotel in Scone on Friday evening.
Australia-based Graduates
Clodagh met with all the Australia-based graduates during her trip. Craig Rounsefell, recently set up a bloodstock agency, Boomer Bloodstock, was in the Hunter Valley on business and had time to meet with Clodagh for coffee and a catch up on his current plans. Kate Grimwade met Clodagh at Rosehill races, where she was representing Gai Waterhouse who had the impressive “More Joyous” win the Suncorp Banking Tea Rose Stakes Group 2. Clodagh called into Coolmore to meet Henry Field and she also met Eden Harrington at the races.