"Just" a Colt Starter

I've been told before that anyone can start a horse but only a real horseman can finish a horse. The horse world is an interesting place, because no credentials are required to hang out a shingle and call yourself a trainer. There's no bar exam. No state board of licensing. Anyone can decide they want to train horses and run with it.

There can be pros to the freedom of this system but an obvious con is the fact that you can take your horse to a trainer thinking they are educated and qualified, only to end up with a mess because the trainer didn't really know what they were doing. This is a very legitimate issue and something I have seen happen more than once in the horse industry. And frustration with this problem I think can bleed over into people's overall opinions of colt starters. For many people a colt starter is nothing more than an expensive crash dummy testing out their young horse to see if it's sane. They don't care that much what they do as long as they are riding the horse in 30 days. Trainers who have reached a point in their career where they no longer want to start colts, can sometimes develop a negative attitude towards those who do. "Oh they're just a colt starter", "They don't really need to know much to do that", "Any idiot can hop on a young horse".

The fact of the matter is, not every horse and rider needs to know how to do canter pirouettes, rollbacks, flying lead changes, tempi changes, or spins. But every rider wants a horse that's sane and easy to handle. Yes you could throw "anyone" on a young horse and hope for the best, but giving a horse a good start in life saves you so much hassle later on, fixing problems that people have created. Pullback horses? That's a man made problem. Horses that can't be caught? Also typically a man made issue. So many of the issues people take their horse to a trainer for later on in the horse's life, could have been avoided if they had been started right and managed well. I don't think its an understatement to say that the start a young horse receives can make or break their career. I'm not talking about the particular buttons and dials that they learn from a trainer. I'm talking about the fact that bad training can sour a horse to being worked and even potentially ruin them physically. When people start horses who don't have at least a general understanding of healthy biomechanics and the body development of young horses, hosts of physical problems can arise later in that horse's life.

We need colt starters. Educated ones, who understand how horses think and how their bodies develop. We need more people willing to take the time it takes to put a solid foundation on a horse so that they can be succesful in whatever their owners want to do with them. Colt starting shouldn't just be a job for trainers who don't know very much yet. Nor should it get looked down on because its not as pretty and fancy as other types of training. We need trainers who are good at their jobs. If they want to specialize in a particular discipline? Great! If they want to finish and refine horses? Excellent! If they want to put good starts on young horses? Awesome! Let's make sure we are supporting all of it. It takes all types to make the horse world keep turning.