A local professor has cowritten and edited a new textbook on Horse Pasture Management, set to be distributed across North America. Paul Sharpe has a PhD in animal physiology and is a former professor at the University of Guelph, Kemptville Campus. He retired from a nearly 30-year stint teaching at the University when the College closed his doors in 2015. He began his career teaching courses in Agriculture at the University’s New Liskeard campus, where he lived for over seven years. In 1994, he was transferred to Kemptville to teach agriculture courses there and, in 2008, he began teaching the course on Equine Management.
While teaching the course, Paul realized that there wasn’t a good textbook he could use. Throughout his career he had become involved with a few equine specialist groups and, when he retired, he decided to recruit the experts he knew in the field to help him write a book on the subject. “It has been a three-year project,” Paul says, during which he co-authored the book with sixteen other equine professionals across Canada and the United States.
The textbook’s 18 chapters outline everything from structure, function, and nutritional value of pasture plants, to horse grazing behaviour and feed choices. The chapters are based on the various topics taught in the Equine Management course at the University of Guelph. “The goal is to provide a better life for horses,” Paul says.
The book is being published by Elsevier, a publishing company which is one of the world’s major providers of scientific, technical and medical information. Their Academic Press publishes University-level textbooks of all types, as well as scientific journals. Paul says there are three programs in Canada that would be able to use this book and around 200 in the United States.
Paul is still guest lecturing occasionally at the University of Guelph and is interested in working with anyone needing help managing pastures for horses. Horse Pasture Management will be available for purchase in November, 2018. Paul says an e-version is also in the works.
