Backyard Race Horse: The Training Manual a Comprehensive Off-Track Program for Owners

Rating:
Summary: An excellent informative book
Review: It takes an unbelieveable amount of time, effort, and money toget your racehorse across the finish line. Most racehorse owners turntheir animals and their money and unconditional control over to the racetrack trainer, usually to have the animal return to them injured, most permanently, within a 6 month period. Ms. Castillo, via this excellent book, provides an alternative in her own experience of training horses on her farm. The book is both a how to manual for the beginner and a comparative analysis for the experienced. Ms. Castillo takes you through her training, a to z in great detail. You may argue with her technique or you may question her methods, but I found the information provided invaluable and for myself inspirational to my own training efforts. Ms. Castillo relates how to overcome every obstacle an owner may face in training their own animals, and she is a welcome pioneer promoting her unique idea--instead of pouring money down the toilet with the local track trainer, a practice which ejects owners from the business usually within a couple of years, instead for those thousands and thousands of horse owners, train your own! It could hardly get any better than that.

Rating:
Summary: Terrific methods that go back to nature
Review: People who think that Del Castillo doesn't know what she's talking about should compare her book to Burch's "Training Thoroughbred Horses," a training manual written in the 1950s by a successful horseman. Del Castillo's methods are not ambiguous, and this book should be taken more as a documentation of what worked for her rather than a cookie-cutter formula that can be applied anywhere. Her ideas about letting the horses live outdoors, shipping in to the track for races, and natural, largely drug-free recovery for injuries are stellar. American racehorses are going downhill fast these days--most can barely race beyond eight furlongs, and many suffer stress fractures, bone chips, and joint problems before they are three years old. Del Castillo suggests picking your racehorse for soundness and good mind, rather than just early speed, an excellent idea.

Rating:
Summary: Backyard Racehorse
Review: This is easily one of the greatest training books ever published. It teaches how to train your racehorses with both the horses and your best interest in mind at the same time. It argues clearly and teaches why the method of not overpushing horses and making them run by masking pain with medicine is stupid and offers viable options for trainers who still want to make money. It teaches that the greatest way to make money is to take care of the horse and let it rest when it needs to be cured for injuries instead of pushing it beyond its limits to eventual permanent lameness. One of my favorite portions was about 'carrotology', which illustrated that even racehorses deserve to be loved like a pleasure horse. This book also gives helpful advise to those not only in Thoroughbred racing, but barrel racing and QH racing. One of the greatest things about this book, though, is the fact that the methods described actually worked for the author. Kudos to Janet.