04/12/2025
Beginner safe???
Instead of asking if a horse is beginner safe, maybe we should be asking how many days in a row a horse is expected to stay beginner safe?
Lots of horses are beginner safe for a ride or two on good days, but that doesn’t mean a beginner could handle them and ride them day after day without that horse stressing out and losing his beginner safe status!!!! And that’s assuming an instructor is still present and deeply involved!!!
Pictured is Lise and Jenn with Dudley. On a good day Dudley is a great beginners horse. On a bad day Dudley can see dead people- and he’s not cool with it. Jenn would probably struggle with Dudley on her own, but with Lise’s help, she can ride Dudley even on his bad days. I have two other students who can also pilot Dudley on his bad days with my help.
They sometimes ride Dudley when I’m not there, and they know that if he’s tense that day, maybe they should not canter, but they are competent enough to do well with him walk and trot.  As long as those three are working with him I don’t have to get on him to work through anything. If any of those three riders owned him and worked him on their own without help, long term, eventually bad things would happen. That said, when this guy is good, he’s great, and we can put certain beginners on him.
Out of the eight horses I am currently using for Lessons, there is only one that I think would deal with a beginner day in and day out for a year or more before I think it would all fall apart. I have horses here that failed other lesson programs, but flourish here…. Because Lise and I know how to keep the horses happy. If we see a horse is getting a little bit beginner sour, we put an advanced student on them and work specifically on  whatever that horse needs to get back into a stable, emotional homeostasis again. (This also is amazing for our more advanced riders because this is real life! Helping horses emotionally regulate is the number one thing that makes a rider a good rider!)
I’m not exactly sure how to quantify all the skill sets that someone should require before riding a horse daily, without instruction, and expect to be sustainably safe, but certainly you should at least be able to walk, trot, and canter competently, have some idea of bending walk and trot, and be able to speed up and slow down off seat ON MULTIPLE HORSES before thinking you should own one and ride it regularly without an instructor there.  
