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
most horses had like bone chips or some type of arthritis or kissing spine. And that's just for the structures that were x-rayed because not everyone is going to x-ray the full back. Um, the most common joints to x-ray, I would say is people would x-ray the Hawks, the stifles and the fat locks. And other than that, like the back was an add on that some people did. You can't really image the pelvis very well at all. It's very hard to diagnose. And a lot of that stuff is found post-mortem.
But the vast majority of horses that I was present for the vet checks for ended up having some type of problem. And I also have my suspicions about my own off the track thoroughbreds and little bit morbid here where when they pass, I will be wanting to get them dissected, especially my mom's horse Pogo, because we know that he has pretty terrible kissing spine. But I suspect that there's also potentially something going on in his pelvis and I would be really interested to see what his pelvis looks like.
And for him, he didn't even really have a racing career. He just trained at the racetrack as a two year old and he ended up retiring as a two year old because his owner was getting out of racing. And he also kept bucking his shins and having soft tissue injuries that took him out of training.
It's truly fascinating. Like it's really morbid. I know some people have immense discomfort with it, but I think there's so much to learn. And like, I've heard some people argue it's disrespecting the horse. I don't think it is because they don't care about their bodies after they die. I think it's actually offering them the utmost respect because you're using them to educate yourself and other people to help other horses avoid meeting the same fate and have people become more understanding.
So I think it is a form of massive respect to them. And it's something that I would love to be able to do with more, especially off the track thoroughbreds, because they're just such a good demographic to study because they're the amount of races that they've run, the workouts that they've had, all of that is publicly documented. So you just have a much better database to look at, to look at what the contributing factors are on. Cause you could go this horse ran on turf or this horse ran on dirt. I'm noticing more of these issues on horses that did,
X, Y, Z thing. So that's something that I would really love to move towards. But to get back on topic, I guess what I would ask you is in your practice, what are some of the common bodily issues that you see manifest in horses later in life that you would attribute to when they were started?
Also to add to that too, I would say that when people are referencing that you can get the same strength building by turning your horses out and having them navigate the world without a rider. Like they do not need a rider on their back to have the benefits of strength building and muscle building. And the thing I find very ironic about how we keep a lot of these young horses is.
Once they start training, a lot of them are removed from this herd setting where they're moving around lots. So we're removing how they're moving for like 23 hours a day if they're in an ideal turnout situation and then putting them in human constructed exercise where they are often being ignored when they do show behaviors that are like, hey, actually, this is too much for me. I don't like that. I'm uncomfortable.
Whereas in a turnout situation, sure, they might run themselves to the point where they injure themselves by accident sometimes, but it's a lot more self-paced and they're still putting wear and tear on the body that is in a much more beneficial way. So I've always found that interesting because oftentimes training is removing them from those scenarios to put them in a human manufactured one.
That is exactly what we found with my mom's horse. I'd love to show you his x-rays sometime because they're terrible. He has multiple vertebrae that are like touching and overlapping. And, and this is again, a horse that never actually has like, he never actually had an official race. He has one published work.
yeah and then um i guess like the other thing that to note is that like sometimes these things and don't necessarily show up on x-ray right away even if they can be imaged because if it's a fresh injury you have to wait for it to develop in the bone over time before it can be read on a scan yeah
And a lot of times we misinterpret their behavior or we'll just be like, oh, they're just being difficult. And they're notoriously hard to diagnose an image. And that's one of the things, too. We often see people like say things like we've ruled out pain and you can't rule out pain with an animal that cannot physically tell you, hey, I am not in pain right now because you diagnostics, like you said, don't show the full picture.
No, they're so adaptable and they try to do their best. So when they are being really difficult, there's usually always a reason for it. But unfortunately, we've been conditioned to not consider that and to view...
them through the lens where we feel entitled to their bodies, which is what I think drives a lot of this is that people feel entitled to using horses for whatever they want without having to actually consider the gravity of it. And I guess the next question that I would have is when we're talking about skeletal maturation, what rate is that happening at so that people can get a sense of reality of what the fully mature horse actually is and how skewed and quick a lot of our training protocols are?
yeah that's it's crazy how much research we have on certain topics that are still repeatedly coming up with massive denial in our industry when we've had evidence that has shown reason to critique certain mindsets for so long because i find the same thing with turnout is one that people are still in massive denial for but we have like decades and decades and decades of research that traces back into the
90s and beyond that shows that it's damaging to horses to keep them chronically confined and yet there's still so much denial in the industry and it's so disappointing yeah i agree 100 like the research is there for those who want it there's no question about that or it's not my opinion either that it just is so if you want it it's there
Absolutely I also the one thing that I see like on this document that you send me that I really like that I think is a good point for people to keep in mind is that most racehorses are finishing their careers before their spines even fully developed because that's how short lives their careers typically are. And I think that's a really potent point to make because.
The next five to 10 years rehabilitating something that shouldn't have happened in the first place. Absolutely. And then also for the people who don't want to do that, then we have a bunch of these x-rays horses that have chronic soundness issues that are now being offered on Facebook for free to good home because they're not rideable and people don't want to keep a horse that they can't ride. And there's simply not enough homes to deal with horses like that.
So our industry needs to be accountable. It is like, it is, it's a huge commitment and it's a huge investment. And unfortunately you're right. There is not enough homes. And so many of these horses end up going down the pipeline to slaughter. Right. For sure. There needs to be more accountability on all ends. Cause I do think like the racing industry needs to be accountable for the horses that fall through the cracks and don't end up maintaining long-term homes because of the damage that racing inflicted on their bodies. But in the same vein as an industry, um,
we need to be reflecting on the number of people who get horses and then don't want a horse that they can't ride because that does say something about people's priorities. And I've brought this up before and it often creates a lot of defensiveness because people don't want to honestly look at it. But if you no longer want a horse, especially if you've had them for enough time to get to know them and love them, if you no longer want to pay to care for them when you cannot ride them,
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