Keeping Horses Sound

In a past interview, the late Howard Hale once asked Ricky if he had any trouble keeping all those horses sound.

We got to keep 50 riders going and then the condition is that we have to ride these horses in whether it's outside or in that feed yard anywhere it's going to be tough to keep them sound. But no, we don't. But as many horses as we have, the kind of lameness that we have are very, very minor. We don't see a lot of long term joint trouble or that kind of stuff. If anything, it's little things and it's short term.

One thing that we do at our place is all the shoeing is in-house. I brought a friend of mine in from Oklahoma named Tommy Kilgore. He's been one of the best things for my life as far as knowledge on a horse. He's been really a big deal for me in understanding movement and understanding true soundness in a horse. And I brought him in and I've got two people that I work with, two younger guys that are mid-20s and they've taken into the shoeing. So all of that is done in-house.

Having that and being able to trim these horses and balance them the way we want to  balance them from an early age now all the way up into this five and six year old range when we start marketing those horses to the public. We have a really good idea what this horse is, what his soundness is, and we understand it at above normal level. So we give these horses the best shock we possibly can. And if we end up having a horse that's lame, it's usually a chronic thing that was going to happen anyway most of the time.