Salty Horse Ranch

07/03/2025

Please please please listen to this video! Lots of times we get real excited about riding the horses and especially horses coming off an injury that have atrophied top lines you don’t need to ride them! You need to find somebody that knows how to do the ground work in hand and help that horse build its top line with exercise exercises with no Saddle and no Person on it!
In our rehab program we have been staunch supporters of doing it this way and quite successful I might add! So listen to this video !!!

06/30/2025

When you are working with or particularly showing your horse out of competition, take a minute and seriously ask yourself how this benefits your horse? Although you are winning a ribbon what is your horse winning? Can you honestly say that he enjoyed the endeavor? I’m not saying we should not compete that we shouldn’t ride but at least seriously contemplate this thought and see how you can do better to help your horse enjoy the process.

Gotta be a team game 🏇🏻

06/25/2025

I will probably die on this hill! But the number of horses that are needing such extensive injections prior to eight years old now is so concerning. I ride across multiple disciplines so the finger pointing should stop every discipline is riding their horses too hard too early and we all know it. Watching people pull on their horses faces and put them behind the vertical and stress their neck and spine is not humane. If you have to pull hard on one rain and then the other and then the other rain and see saw your horses head back-and-forth and force “contact” then your horse is not your main concern…. 

Many of us have been conditioned by industry that once a horse hits 4, they're an adult and should be ridden. Some industry practices dictate that horses should be started as young as 18 months - 2 years old and many breeds have been selectively bred to look more mature at a younger age.

But maturity on the outside doesn't indicate maturity on the inside -

A horse’s skeletal development depends on growth plates — areas of cartilage at the ends of bones that allow them to grow longer. Once a bone reaches its full length, the growth plate turns to bone and fuses. Until then, it remains a weak point within the bone.

We need to remember that not all bones mature at the same time -

The bones in the legs fuse earlier - between 6 months and 3.5 years. This gives your horse their height - a red herring that they've finished growing because "look how tall they are!"

But the spine - the bit we literally sit on - doesn't finish fusing until much later - between 5 and 6 years approximately, though depending on height and s*x, it can be as late at 7 or 8.

And equally, the pelvis - an area which receives the forces from the hindlimbs and transfers it to the spine, is formed of multiple pieces which don't finish fusing until the horse is approximately 4.

With all of this in mind, it’s worth asking:

Should we really be sitting on horses whose growth plates are still developing?

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"Should I be riding my horse right now?"

Join Integrative Equine Podiatrist, Beccy Smith, and I as we discuss this topic through a variety of lenses: combining evidence-informed practice and research to give you practical skills to assess your own horse's wellbeing so you can answer the question for yourself.

30.06.2025 19:00 BST

Recording available if you can't make the live ❤️✨️

https://www.yasminstuartequinephysio.com/webinar-should-i-be-riding-my-horse-right-now

06/09/2025

I have my own opinions about Jumping Horses… I was taught very early in my life that every Horse only has a certain and very finite number of jumps in it. I was also taught not to jump Horses whose confirmation confirmations don’t support it. It’s really too bad though! 😂 Boone is NOT built to jump … but he looks so cute with Charlee doing it!!!

06/05/2025

This is becoming a hot topic. We have horses that have poor x-rays and are already needing injections by the time they are four or five years old. Horses needing maintenance at five years old is an interesting concept to me and I will leave it at that. But I do not have the same feeling as the rest of the sellers that buyers need to “get over it” and stop expecting to find the perfect horse. In good conscience as a trainer I am not going to advise a client of mine to start with a four year-old that even has mild arthritis in both fat locks. I’m not going to do it especially the money that we pay for Horses these days. I also in my rehabilitation journey see lots and lots of horses who had perfectly fine x-rays and end up with significant injuries and end up at my facility. Horses are a liability in general. However, as a seller you cannot expect buyers to take on known issues no matter how small you think they are. I hope in the industry will start to do better soon.

06/03/2025

Little bit, by little bit our dream of having a 15 acre conditioning track with great views and in the shade of big oak trees is coming true ♥️ if your dream is so big that you can’t believe it could ever happen then it’s a dream worth having. It’s really nice to just relax and spend time with family when it’s just too hot to do anything else. We just go out and move sticks! 😂

06/02/2025

The old man (Blue) our stallion is back to work!!! Well riding work anyway!

06/01/2025

Is fawn rehab easy work… hell no! I have had so many people in my life complain that I can’t travel or I can’t go very far away from home during the month of May June July because of these guys. They have to be fed every four hours and it does limit my life. I dont care! I would never change it for the world and I hope that everybody finds a passion that they are this in love with. Every year I love every one of these little babies ♥️♥️♥️♥️
This W***y, Loretta and Lyle…. Every year we choose a theme that we name the babies from, anyone wanna guess what this year’s theme is?

Follow our Salty Horse Ranch Fawn Rehabilitation page to see our 2025 journey!

05/28/2025

This is a really great price for this little horse! And everybody’s always asking me all the time for good horses at a reasonable price. This is as reasonable as you were going to find!

05/27/2025

Dressage is not really a discipline. It's a training method. In 1667 William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle published "The New Method of Dressing Horses". If you think that "dressing horses" means putting on blankets, you'd be wrong. European aristocrats preferred French as the language of horsemanship and "dressing" comes from the French word for training "dressage".

The "New Method of Dressing Horses" is about a new way to train horses that Cavendish observed in the Ottoman Empire when he traveled there to avoid the English Civil War. The Ottoman horse trainers used methods that were less harsh than those used in Europe. The new method was more aligned with the natural impulses of horses. It can be said that Cavendish was the first to introduce natural horsemanship to the West.

Therefore, originally dressage was not a discipline but rather a training method. We have forgotten this, and the disappearance of this practical perspective has been a great loss to horsemanship.

We are now seeing another training method, groundwork, evolving into a competitive discipline. The American Quarter Horse Association now has groundwork competition classes in their Versatility Ranch Horse Competitions. I suspect that eventually we will see something like a Groundwork Competition Association making groundwork into a discipline where people who enjoy doing groundwork can win ribbons.

It is not the worst thing to see training methods turned into competition disciplines, but it is a bad thing when these competitions become almost exclusively how people think of dressage or groundwork and the original purpose gets lost. Horses need quality training methods like original dressage and groundwork. We don't need more venues for ribbon chasing. Dressage and groundwork are essential training for all horses for every breed and discipline.

05/26/2025