World-renowned horse and elephant trainer Dr Andrew McLean has a soft spot for South Australia – his mentor Tom Roberts was from SA, McLean worked closely with the late, great trainer Peter Hayes, and he even won the Gawler Three Day Event back in 1989.
So when Racing SA approached him about hosting a one-off Equitation Clinic in Adelaide he didn’t need much convincing.
“The first workshop I ever did was in the Adelaide Hills, and one of my greatest mentors as a trainer was Tom Roberts who is very much a South Australian icon,” McLean said from his Mornington Peninsula property.
“When you have a horse, it’s rather like having a high performance car - it makes a lot of sense to know about the engineering of it.
“And that’s where I sort of consider myself a mind engineer helping people understand what’s going on, because there’s so much of a traditional narrative about it that it kind of blinds people to what really are the basic principles which horses rely on to learn things.
“That’s what I’ll be talking about - the basic principles of training - there are 10 of them and I’ll be going through all of those, and looking at making the horses life a better life as well, because the two go hand in hand,” he said.
Leading South Australian trainer Peter Hayes also left a lasting impression on McLean. He spent three years consulting for Hayes at Lindsay Park and Flemington, before Hayes was tragically killed in a plane crash in 2001.
“I honestly never met a race horse trainer who was as insightful as he was, and so willing to look outside the square,” McLean said. “I was deeply impressed by his curiosity and willingness to give things a try.
“For example, instilling in all of the people who handle the horses to have a single approach so that every horse knows the same rules. And that’s just so important and one of the things I’m going to be talking about.
“It’s like if you teach a person English, but then you start speaking French to them, they don’t know what you’re talking about.
“In the horse’s case it can get blamed for it when really, if we were all consistently doing the same kind of thing, it would be a whole lot easier for the horse.”
McLean doesn’t do many clinics these days, he’s busy running an online Diploma of Equitation course which has 150 students enrolled from around Europe and Australia.
He’s also considered one of the world’s leading elephant trainers, and is the elephant specialist for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.
“We’re now the training partners for five countries – Nepal and India, Thailand, Laos and Myanmar, and it’s going really well,” McLean said.
“The elephant training started because I was doing a clinic in Helsinki and someone from the World Wide Fund for Nature came looking for an elephant trainer – but not a traditional one because that was the problem.
“The traditional system was really broken and dangerous because a lot of people were getting killed so I started doing that in 2006, and that’s been going ever since. It involves a lot of work on zoom and we’ve developed an app to help mahouts, and we’ve made a lot of changes throughout South East Asia.
“It’s been really interesting to me – the horse world that I’ve been working with, especially in Europe, you’re dealing with the wealthiest people in the world who can afford to have dressage horses, but in the elephant world I’m working with the poorest people in the world.
“The mahouts who ride and train the elephants are considered very much second class citizens in most countries especially Nepal and India, and yet they are the most open to learn and it’s quite fantastic.
“The horse work has certainly informed all of my work with elephants so it’s really nice having the two species. The theory is exactly the same. Basically you cross out the word horse and write elephant,” he said.
Click here to secure your spot in Andrew McLean’s clinic on May 28 at the Clive Reed Equestrian Centre.
