When should I start riding my horse?

About a gazillion years ago, I asked our so-called qualified vet that very question regarding our then coming two-year-old and was told (word for word): “He’s a lot stronger than he looks, so go ahead.”

That has to be the single worst piece of horse advice in the history of bad horse advice, and I’ll tell you why. 1) No young horse is stronger than it looks, and of course it isn’t; no matter what it looks like on the outside, it’s still a baby on the inside. 2) Any vet who tells someone that is a moron.

Instead of talking to myself for the next twenty pages (since I doubt horse folks who’ve made up their minds and/or have their own agendas and reasons for doing things will listen to little-ol’ me), I’ll just post a link to
Deb Bennet’s (Ph.D.) study on equine skeletal development

Read it; repeat it; print copies off and hang them up in your barn or leave them on the table in your Boarder’s Lounge or pass them out at your kid’s local 4-H or Horse Club meeting. Futurities be damned; I want my horses alive and sound beyond the eight-year-old mark.