Australian Thoroughbred Bloodstock P/L (ASIC FSL:255488) was established in 1997 by Darren and Elizabeth Dance after they had spent many years successfully racing horses in Victoria and South Australia, including the dual Group one winning Mookta. All young horses are handled on a regular basis and educated from a young age, it’s just like preschool for children, we prepare them for the future. We
anlings are taught to lead and introduced to our stables, round yard , walking machine and wash bay early in their life, so when they eventually arrive at the trainers complexes they adapt with ease. We get outstanding feedback from all of our trainers on how relaxed our horses are in the stable, what good eaters they are and what good bone they have. We ensure that all horses on our stud are given the best quality feed and care available, they are drenched and have their feet trimmed by our farrier every 5 weeks. We use Bruce Marsh, a master horse breaker to break in all of our horses. Bruce, a master on a horse competes in barrel racing, cutting etc is able to put the polish on our young horses by teaching them balance and steering. All yearlings are spelled after breaking in and then attend 4 weeks of pretraining at Warrnambool to teach them barriers, pool, track and ties up , rounding off their education and they are then ready for the trainers. Preparing young horses for racing is similar to us preparing to play football or any sport for that matter. We educate them about the environment and the rules and then we use pretraining like footballers use preseason, to obtain fitness and strength to perform on game day. Some horses are just natural runners with early fast twitching muscle to run early, others are like ruckman, they are all arms and legs and need time and plenty of pretraining and spelling cycles to enable them to perform at their best when they are mature enough for their body to cope with it.
