A young/green horse is not a good idea for a new/novice rider in general.

This is definitely true unless you have an excellent trainer who agrees to school your horse 3 times a week and you school him a fourth time. I'm still a novice rider and I learned so much training my 3 year old green broke thoroughbred. I had no idea it was so much work keeping a young horse's body straight! My legs were in excellent shape.

Look at some Buck Brannaman tapes. He's not the easiest teacher, not the most patient, can sometimes be tough to understand. Some of the other folks are easier to understand. But Buck is the purest, in my view.


The old way was to exhaust the horse. Maybe beat it up. Maybe castrate it w/o an anasthetic. Imagine, in l975 I was taught at vet school that if you castrated a colt using chloral hydrate (paralyses the horse, 0 pain killer) and then saddled it it "taught the horse something".
The bizarre thing is that most colts seemed to think that if you did that, well it survived, if that was the worst you had then maybe you might be the leader and could be followed.

Throwing the saddle on a green colt and letting it buck itself out is sort of this mindset. Lots of this thinking remains.

I just wanted to mention Richard Shrake. That's a name I remember from my horse training/showing days. Just Google him and you'll find his website. He's based in Oregon but it looks like he's still doing clinics all over, and has an accreditation program for instructors, so maybe you can find a coach in your area. I think he was ahead of his time with his gentle methods. He also has a lot of DVDs available, if that's what you're looking for.

You can look into most "natural horsemanship" person. Parelli, and the like. You can also look into the very old classical dressage like the Spanish riding school or the Cadre Noir.

Not all horses will work with marker training. I have one in my barn at the moment. It is fun to work on tricks but not practical under saddle.

I am a dressage rider and trainer, I use some classical and modern dressage as well as "natural horsemanship" and ground work like long and short reins and study the biomechanic of rider and horses.

Horse training as you know needs even more timing then then dog training when in the saddle plus a lot of feel. I have a string of complicated horses at the moment. Think of them as the Mals of horses. Hot sensitive fast and not often sensible when they are young. Fun starts when you can feel them think of what they want to do.

Most riders will dream of my horses but those who see them prefer to just enjoy the show and stay away from them.

In other words just like dogs, horses are all different so you can find a green but not too complicated horse and enjoy the journey. Them move to a bigger challenge or not.

I would love a Mal but that would be out of my league. I will stick to my German warmblood horses and dobies.