Gelding - especially doing so early on - leads to soundness in the legs?
 

This was a belief Vosburgh strongly endorsed in print....

Still accepted today - or a theory that has been debunked?

Absolutely correct regardless of what the fat man says.

If so -- all of these real cheaper bred horses who don't look promising early-on should probably be gelded as yearlings.

I'm suprised by how many horses at PID who are age 4 and 5 - and are still ungelded according to the PP's - yet have displayed no lick of ability at any time in their racing career.

If you gelded all of them you wouldnt make too many mistakes

Of course now guys are hesitant to geld horses because geldings can't be given steroids or even testosterone. A "whole" horse is allowed to have unlimited testosterone in their systems but a gelding is limited.

Game On Dude, Wise Dan, and Little Mike are all six-year-old geldings.

Game On Dude is the big campaigner of the bunch.

He's the one who has Baffert drilling him and he's danced a lot of dances.

He's competed in a major Derby prep, he's competed in a 3yo Classic race. He's competed in two different Breeders Cup Classics and a Dubai World Cup. He's competed on 9 different tracks.

Little Mike and Wise Dan both travel all over as well. It would be fun to see them asked to do a little more and not be so cautiously handled.

The 5-year-old gelding, Comma To The Top, just went old-school and won a Graded Stakes race in New York off of just six days of rest.

Perhaps a lot more horses should be gelded before they race.

Awesome Gem was a gelding also.

Don't you think a lot of these runners stick around because they're geldings (and can't be bred) rather than having them gelded so they will race for a long time?
i.e. - their long carrers are a result of not being able to breed them

I had always assumed exactly that.

The reason I posted this was because I found the case made by Vosburgh to be very interesting.

I had always assumed the only benefits of gelding were to make horses more manageable and easier to train.

Just finished gelding three today..next monday the final three..it's really a no brainer with the homebreds that come my way. Some of these 2 yo's are already getting thick around the neck and shoulder..Gelding them will help thin them out a bit upfront..

It's done a lot in this part of the world - well over 50% of the male horses racing in NZ are gelded.

Of course, that's partly because the good colts are retired earlier, but the majority are geldings even from a young age. The NZ Derby this year, for example, had four colts, four fillies and 10 geldings.

Don't stallions start to fill out particularly in front? That'd put more weight on their forelegs and possibly increase risk of injury. If you've got a horse that might have soundness issues with those legs, might make sense to geld them to support a future racing career, esp. when you don't want to pass that conformation issue on to foals anyway. Even if there's not a conformation problem, if the horse is gonna be fairly big and his breeding isn't very commercial, you can just opt to have a racing career rather than risk having nothing at all.

yes, they should be. but too many people think they'll have the next storm cat or ap indy. people lamented horses like kelso, forgo and john henry being gelded-but they may have never become the horses they turned out to be had they been left intact.

AG Vanderbilt once said (I paraphrase) that if he had gelded all his colts he'd have made only one mistake. The mistake would have been Native Dancer.