Whoa!

Filly hitting the brakes~

My mentor has been teaching me how to see horses in a different way for quite a while now.  One of the things that my uneducated eye never realized - was that horses prefer to "use" their rear-end!  The rear-end is the engine that drives them forward & stops them when they want to stop!  I'm told that an astounding percentage of all lameness comes from a problem with the rear-end!   If the rear isn't working properly,  horses - being the amazingly athletic creatures that they are, begin to compensate.  The easiest way for them to do that is to overuse their front!  They begin pulling themselves along - rather than pushing!  This shows up as an overdeveloped front end, after miles & years of forced adaptation.

I was warned that once I learned to see this - that I would also see a lot of rear-end issues.  That particular point was brought home to me when I watched a old video of my mare Jas, when she was only 6 or 7 years old, pulling herself up the hill to the barn after a easy ride.  It seemed So easy for me to see now... that she had rear-end lameness issues - that I started berating myself for not seeing it then!   I had to stop & remind myself that life is all about learning from our mistakes...  She did have weak hooves, no walls & never grew hoof, but still - if the rear-end issues had been addressed earlier in her career, she might have had a more pain free & successful competitive life.  Jas was bred from show stock, not performance.  We didn't buy her as an endurance prospect, but we ended up in the sport.  Advice I seen given now - to riders interested in starting in Endurance - is to ride the horse you have & that's what I did. 

Taking photos of the horses yesterday for Dean's blog, I was lucky enough to snap the photo above & after reviewing it - realized that it was a great example of what I've learned!