Footloose Farm LLC

06/21/2025

I feel like regular body work or therapies are very important as we ask are horses to be athletes. We love Casie Pelnar and all her knowledge of cranial sacral work and multiple other modalities!

04/23/2025

Yes very true. And we agree with also further points that our system doesn't support good development of young horses either. Poor breeding and lacking a training system are huge factors of why we have so many lame horses.

At the 2024 Paris Olympics, none of the horses on the U.S. show jumping or eventing teams were American-bred. Not one.

Every mount representing red, white, and blue was born and brought up overseas, while our own breeding barns churn out thousands of foals a year. For a country as vast, wealthy, and horse-obsessed as the United States, that’s embarrassing.

It’s not a fluke. It’s a symptom of a broken system. We are not producing our own elite equine athletes because we’re not breeding for them.

In many U.S. breeding programs, the decision to breed a mare often isn’t based on her competition success. It’s based on injury. She bowed a tendon at four? Breed her. She fractured a sesamoid before she ever showed? Put her in foal so she “doesn’t just sit.” She was too unsound to make it through a futurity season? “She has a nice head.” This is breeding as damage control. Not selection. Not strategy.

We’re taking the horses who didn’t last, who couldn’t compete, and we’re passing those traits: genetic unsoundness, poor conformation, low resilience, on to the next generation. And we’re doing no better with the boys.

The U.S. barn landscape is simply not set up to support stallions. Most boarding facilities don’t allow them. Trainers often discourage keeping colts intact due to behavioral concerns and limited resale value. As a result, some of our most promising bloodlines are literally cut off before they even have a chance to contribute. Meanwhile, Europe is building stallion careers alongside competition careers, backing them with systems designed to assess, preserve, and promote excellence.

Across Europe, breeding is a science, not an afterthought. Registries require mares to pass performance tests. Stallions must prove themselves through the same performance tests as well as competition and through the quality of their offspring. Longevity, trainability, reproductive soundness, and rideability matter, just as much as flash. In the Netherlands, the KWPN registry ensures that horses with structural and genetic flaws are actively removed from the breeding pool. They are building better horses on purpose, while performance testing is virtually nonexistant in the USA. We’re gambling on foals from horses who quite literally could not even finish the race.

Why do we do this? Because our industry rewards early speed, early sales, and early burnout. We breed for yearling sales, futurities, and young horse classes. We reward breeders who produce a shiny prospect, not a durable horse.

We need a complete shift in breeding values. That means stopping the practice of breeding injured or completely unproven mares and instead selecting those who lasted, who stayed sound, performed consistently, and demonstrated resilience over time. It also means investing in infrastructure that allows promising colts to remain stallions, rather than gelding them for convenience or marketability. We must begin to track soundness, temperament, and fertility across generations, using that data to make informed decisions. And we need to embrace modern tools: genetic testing, performance records, and international benchmarks, instead of relying on nostalgia or sentiment. Because right now, we are selecting for the opposite of what we need. And it’s playing out in rehab barns, in short-lived careers, and yes, on the Olympic scoreboard.

This isn’t a crusade against breeders. It’s a call for accountability, ambition, and change. If we want to see American-bred horses wearing stars and stripes again, not just in name, but in origin, we need to start breeding for more than emotion and convenience. We need to breed horses that can stand the test of time, not just pass a vet check at a sale. Until we do, we’ll just keep buying our best from Europe, and wondering where our greatness went.

01/23/2025

11/22/2024

Love this! Very true.

A Course About Straightness, of course!

11/06/2024

10/06/2024

Great insights. I try to help my students become riders, but also trainers; as that helps them so much in the future become more independent and problem solving is so important in daily riding.

There’s a difference between a rider and a trainer. I’m not talking about the difference between an AA and a Pro. A “rider” is someone who rides the horse, doing what the horse already knows. Certainly you can be a good rider or not so good. And you can even be a Grand Prix “rider.” And that’s nothing to sneeze at! Learning to be a really good rider is a huge accomplishment. You keep the horse where they are in their training. Hopefully through good riding you keep them fit, happy, confident, keep their minds and bodies sound. All wonderful things.

A “trainer” is different, though. A trainer is able to assess a horse, and come up with a path to improve the way the horse goes and then hopefully teach the horse new things. A trainer needs a very inquisitive mind, needs to be bold enough to push the envelope sometimes, and needs enough grit to work through the inevitable mistakes that will arise. Mistakes are no fun, especially when you’re on a 1200 lb animal, who might tell you that you made a big one 😳 But there’s no learning without mistakes. And as a trainer - that’s your job. Your horse is going to have to learn new things from you. New movements, yes, but also new concepts (that we often call “the basics”) that really change the way they use their body.

Are people just naturally “riders” or “trainers?” Sometimes. I’ve met some young kids who just intuitively wanted to train their horse, and not just ride him. But I’ve also met plenty of people who were “riders” and over time became very effective “trainers.”

Want to be more of a trainer? Learn to assess a horse’s strengths and weaknesses. Learn when to push and when to just cruise for a while. What do you do when you run into a problem that’s tricky or one you didn’t expect? All of these can be learned, mostly from horses who will teach you but hopefully from an educated and patient trainer who has run into whatever problem you’re having many times before. That’s why great trainers still work with another trainer themselves. Always more to learn. Always a new problem to solve, and no single person has all the answers. I’m so grateful to all the trainers who helped and are still helping me learn!!