Page 80 - Speedhorse November 2019

Preparing Young Horses
FOR RACE TRAINING
“It really
pays to start
building that
fitness even
before they
are broke to
saddle and
have to carry
a rider.”
by Heather Smith Thomas
Young racehorses have a tough job. They are still immature and growing when first started under saddle and entering training, with their owners and trainers trying to get them into peak fitness and racing ability for their first races at an early age. They must develop strength and fitness rapidly, without being pushed so fast that they suffer injuries or damage to young bones and joints.
“It really pays to start building that fitness even before they are broke to saddle and have to carry a rider,” says Bill Casner, a longtime horseman in Flower Mound, Texas. He has owned and trained racehorses for many years and was co-owner of WinStar Farms in Kentucky for a long time. Today, he continues to raise and train a few racehorses on his ranch in Texas.
“In preparation for a sale or for training our
own race prospects, we generally start getting them in shape several months ahead,” he says. “We start swimming our yearlings in April, and swim them for about four or five months before the sale. I gradually adapt them to swimming. I don’t throw too much at them in the beginning because they are not fit, and they are still growing.
“I swim them first in a chute pool, and also have a bigger swimming island in one of my lakes,” he continues. “I start these youngsters in the chute pool because they don’t have to swim very far. I want it to be a positive experience for them, and we do it incrementally, gradually working them into it. It’s small baby steps in the beginning,”
These yearlings have to learn to walk down a ramp and walk through water. “I have a small chute and that’s the first step; we just walk them through that mini-chute, down a ramp, and up a ramp,” he says. “It has sides on
it and we generally use an older horse to walk in front of them. The experienced horse is a good role model; they have to learn to walk down and then up an unfamiliar surface, and they catch onto it pretty quickly.
“Then we start filling that chute with water,” he explains. “We put a couple inches of water in it the
first time, and that’s a whole new deal. They stick their nose down and smell it and splash it with their foot and realize it’s not scary and they walk through it. Then we gradually fill it up a bit more on subsequent lessons until it’s up to their knees when they walk through it. Most of the time we are leading them through, but when they get
to where they are comfortable with it, we’ll put two ropes on them (one on each side) and walk them through it with a handler on each side (outside the chute).
“As soon as they are comfortable with that, we use the big chute. It’s about 100 feet long, with ramps. They only have to swim about eight or 10 strokes. Then we gradually build them up by going back and forth until they are going through it a dozen times at a session. They start learning how to swim and begin to get fit before we ever take them to the swimming island in the lake.
“That’s when we start building them up with multiple rounds,” says Casner. “They go in a chute with an island that they swim around. The first time, we only have them swim around it one time and come out. This last spring, the first time we took them to the big lake, they all walked right in and all swam perfectly and were not stressed. They were ready for it.”
Some years back, he read Temple Grandin’s book Animals in Translation. “It turned on a lot of lights for me,” he says. In that book, Grandin explained how her autism and “thinking in pictures” allows her to focus on visual details more intensely, which enables her to “take in the world as animals do.” She points out many of the little details that most people tend to ignore that may be scary to animals.
“It changed my horsemanship. When a horse, especially a young horse, is scared, it may freak out
Round pen exercise can help make a horse fitter without any extra weight on his back. Putting a saddle on a young horse in the round pen is a good way to help build strength and will help keep him from injuring himself when a rider gets on his back.
78 SPEEDHORSE, November 2019
EQUINE HEALTH