Barney, an 8 year old paint horse, was boarded at the farm that I had just purchased in 2010. I never met his owner. She lost interest in him and soon he became a school horse for me. He is one of those horses that everyone likes. He is funny, playful, and friendly. Give him a great big ball and he has a blast chasing it and pouncing on it. And, if there was a little jump or cavaletti in the arena, he would drag his rider toward it. Oops. It was not uncommon to hear me say “nonono don’t let him go toward that jump!” I could “see it in his eye” halfway across the arena.
He also has conformation challenges. He was bred for western pleasure. At the croup, he’s 16.1 hands, at the withers he’s 15.3 hands, he has short upright pasterns, and straight hocks making him naturally slow with flat gaits. This conformation is associated with hock arthritis and navicular disease, and he has been diagnosed with both.
By 10 he was not able to sustain a light lessons schedule of 3 or 4 lessons a week. He had intermittent mild lameness and began to resist work. He was generally very polite in his resistance such as refusing to move, doing little hops, and on a couple occasions he offered his riders easy dismount by lowering his belly to the ground. I interpreted these as pain or discomfort and repeatedly gave him time off until he was sound again. I was in what I call “horse pain paralysis” where the horse’s physical pain or discomfort mentally paralyzes the trainer. Of note: Time off never prevented the next lameness episode. He needed help learning to use his body in a more efficient and healthy way. It took me some time to learn this, but he was ready and willing once I was capable.
This cycle of lameness came to a peak around the time that I was solidifying my shift into using classical dressage therapeutically. Even though the consensus seemed to be that this conformation just does not hold up and it is certainly not suitable for dressage, I decided to try anyway. Barney deserved the effort. I had a young student who was interested in learning rehabilitative dressage, so I paired her with Barney and they learned together.
In the video below, you are not going to see a flashy dressage horse, but it briefly shows the results over time (with various riders). The emphasis on the direction of loading on the forelimb, and the lines provide visual cues used to determine that. Other changes evident in the video are his head and neck carriage. He raised the neck and added longitdinal flexion at the poll. This was NOT achieved by holding his reins tight. It is the natural consequence of lifting the trunk between the shoulder blades. Once a horse's musculoskeletal health is compromised, using any force in the reins can increase the risk of progressing the damage that is already there; not a risk I will take with rehab cases. It does not matter where the damage is, the whole musculoskeletal system is connected and we treat lameness as a whole-body coordination problem. When the front foot is on the ground too far back under the belly, the direction of peak loading is too far from vertical. “Too far back” is determined by conformation and the horse’s response. Barney’s extreme conformation requires that the front foot come off the ground earlier than a more average conformation. How we know: because when he is unloading the forelimb closer to the girth, he will trot with the slightest request, in part because the hind limbs are in a better situation to push off into trot.
Proof of prevention is hard to do because the lack of evidence of lameness is not something that can be measured. There is a famous saying “absence of evidence of something is not evidence of its absence. It just means you can’t find it.” You can’t say, for example, “There is evidence of no cancer.” That is impossible. You can say “There is no evidence of cancer.” This is not cancer, it is osteoarthritis (OA) but often the same logic is applied. Furthermore, OA can not be "cured" yet and it is often confused with lameness and pain. The research on OA contradicts this. In a prevention and rehabilitation focused paradigm, logic would dictate that for a horse previously chronically lame, now sound for 8 years, something changed. There was no medical intervention such as surgery, pain killers, or joint injections, and there was an increase in work. The only change beside aging, which should increase lameness and progression of OA, was dressage gymnastics used therapeutically. The owner still enjoys riding the horse. The horse’s resistance diminished. The owner does not pay for therapies to keep the horse sound. This is what successful rehabilitation means to me.
Barney learned a new working posture that minimizes loading on compromised joints. We did not try to micromanage this on an individual muscle level because there are multiple combinations of muscle actions that can achieve identical movement. The complexity of that eliminates it as a plausible solution. We worked on the entire body coordination creating a high trunk posture to unload the fore and relieve the damaging loading on the navicular bone. This has a cascading effect through the body bringing hind limb loading into a comfortable and efficient range.
Given his vulnerability to lameness, we used low impact work and encouraged him to use a very high balance and collection in walk and trot. Yes! That is possible for this conformation! It just does not look as dramatic as it would for a horse purpose bred for dressage. The work included riding, in-hand, and lunging, and one of the most important elements is trotting at HIS natural cadence which is very slow. Since starting this work Barney has remained sound even while being ridden more frequently than ever, and without any “joint maintenance” or therapeutic shoeing. All Barney and his owner do to maintain his soundness is therapeutic dressage gymnastics, and that is easy on the wallet.
A side note: It can be seen by the end of the video that the medial glutes (large muscle across the croup) have reduced in size. It is thought that the overdevelopment of the medial glutes is protective of the hind limb joints. Given that he is remaining sound, it is fair to assume that his new locomotor patterns are such that his body does not need the extra protection.
Another side note: when Barney plays in the pasture, his bucks have become much higher, more square an powerful. He’s using his new coordination when he plays. And remember, he is not getting younger. He recently turned 19.
My student now owns Barney, and they enjoy trail rides, goofing off, and an occasional little jump, but she always does their therapeutic dressage work in the arena. She can feel when he starts to drift toward bad habits, and she can guide him back to healthy movement. I continue to support them as needed. Both continue to grow in their dressage journey, and their canter work is developing nicely. What is Barney’s limit for this rehabilitative work? We don’t know yet, but every sound day is cherished and nurtured with focused and mindful work.
