Shelby Dennis
speaker
575 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 4 Jun
Shelby Dennis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
hi everybody and welcome back to the making milestones podcast today we have a special guest with Elise Mickey an osteopath who is also a pacific northwest canadian resident like myself so this is very exciting i'll let her introduce herself because she'll be able to do that much better than i can and then we have a very exciting topic that is a little bit or more than a little bit controversial
That's so awesome. Yeah, it's very exciting. I like osteopathy seems to be a little bit more new with horses. I don't remember it even really being an option that we could seek out a couple or not more than a couple of years ago. But growing up for sure, it was not something that was even on my radar, whereas massage and body work kind of was. So it's really nice to see it increasing in popularity.
And what we were going to talk about today is something that I'm really excited about because it does touch on a lot of my previous belief systems and how I used to show up with horses.
And that is the myth of the riding two-year-olds and the equine skeletal maturation. And this is something that's super common in the horse world where we see people buying into this belief system that starting horses at two years old produces sounder horses. And I'm really interested to hear your thoughts on that.
For sure. And there's certain industries where it's much more common, like obviously with the racing industry, that's one of the most prevalent industries that we see it in, but it's also incredibly common in AQHA with all horses of all disciplines competing on that circuit.
And honestly, just with like many types of horses, because then we see people who, even if they don't have plans to compete, they kind of buy into these mindsets that are driven by the competition world and their decisions for when they start their horses are colored by these belief systems that we see in these industries. Yeah, definitely agree. Like it's showing up in pleasure horses just as much as performance horses from my perspective. So yeah.
not just the racehorses though we are most commonly seeing those ones oh for sure and i'd like as some people know if they've listened to my podcast before for a number of years i was working at the racetrack and i did end up riding a lot of two-year-olds through that and honestly initially when i was building my career as a horse trainer i was buying into a lot of the industry belief systems because
it was kind of necessary to do if you want to make it as a trainer. Otherwise you have to be present with this awareness and either go against that awareness and do things that feel wrong or be in conflict with most of the people around you and have it really impact the clientele you can take and the opportunities that you get. So initially when I was starting out as a trainer, um,
I wanted to buy into this belief system that starting horses at two years old did produce sounder horses. And I was one to cite the bone remodeling studies they have conducted on racehorses. And I wanted to believe these things even as I was working in the racing industry. And I was fortunate that my initial introduction to working with racehorses, the trainer that I worked with was very progressive and she was a lot more open.
open to new ways of doing things she didn't want to work her two-year-olds as hard they were still ridden but i wanted to bring that up just to reaffirm the fact that there are people within that industry that are trying to do things differently within a system that's inherently broken because realistically if you're going to be in the racing industry if you don't start your horses at two it does disadvantage you in a lot of ways and it makes people not want to give you get their horses to you to train so there's a lot of challenges there but
Needless to say, my initial intro to that was wanting to buy into this belief system. And then over the years that I was working in the racing industry, it became a lot harder to ignore. And now years later, it's been about five or six years since I've worked at the racetrack.
I've been reflecting quite heavily on off-the-track thoroughbreds and what I have seen in vet checks with retiring racehorses that I was helping sell, as well as with the off-the-track thoroughbreds that I own. And there has been this growing discomfort in noticing these things. And then there's also people like yourself and Bex Nairn that have been very openly talking about these things. And it's really put a spotlight on it. So I would be interested in hearing like,
How would you respond to some, like, what are the belief systems that you find that people use to defend starting horses this young? And what is your perspective on whether or not that is okay and whether or not it's something that we should continue doing?
Absolutely. And the knees are such a funny thing to fixate on because when you look at what, as you said, what the body's actually doing, a lot of the load is being carried by the spine. And then with racehorses, it's like sinking back onto their hind end to leap out of the starting gates and then really driving from behind and all of these things that...
are using other parts of the body that are woefully immature. So how would you describe to people who aren't aware, what are the growth plates? What are we referencing when we're talking about fusing, just for people who don't have that baseline knowledge?
Yeah, and I guess the next thing that I would like to touch on is that a lot of people who might have a hard time hearing this might be thinking this, but one of the biggest defenses I see behind Riding Horses Young is the idea of bone remodeling and how it makes the joints and the bones stronger. So would you be able to talk a little bit about what bone remodeling is and whether or not you feel there's truth to that statement?
That makes sense. And I think one thing that I would like to touch on too is a lot of the studies people reference for that and studies that I used to reference myself. If you look at the actual studies and the framework of how they function, they are only monitoring horses until the age of eight years old maximum. So they're not factoring in what their bodies are looking like when they should be hitting their prime or later in life. So it's a flawed...
mindset to reference in the first place because we should be shooting higher than just having horses remain sound until they're eight years old because that realistically should just be when their careers are actually beginning and that's something that I've noticed with the racehorse studies the ones on racehorses actually are more about horses between the ages of like two and five years old because the average racehorse only has about a like a career until they're five years of age or so and
having been present for more vet checks than the average person. And this is something that I haven't necessarily talked about as openly because it is kind of my word against everyone else's, because since I didn't pay for the fat checks, I don't have any of the evidence of what I've witnessed. It's just kind of a dude, trust me moment. This is what I saw. But yeah,
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