Published by the podcast host. Names and equestrian terms may drift — the audio is the source of truth.
So I typically kick the episodes off by having the guests tell us who they are and what it is they do. I’m Sue Dyson. I’m an equine veterinarian and have been so since 1980. But I grew up with a passion for riding. I was a competitor.
I was most interested in inventing but also did some show jumping and I had the good fortune to produce from novice to advanced level three horses, one of which went on to compete that 2 Olympic Games, one did an Olympic Game, a World Championships and one of the others won the Junior European Show Jumping Championships twice. So I’ve been Henry fortunate in having developed horses and learnt a lot from having had those horses and also had some horses that were failures, which gave me a big perspective on the problems that riders face with their horses, which that was a huge tipping point for my profession as a as an equine veterinarian. But it also produced various other opportunities to learn from other people. So for example, when I was competing at the Pony Club Championships, I was approached by a lady called Sheila Wilcox, who was the first woman to ride at the European three day Event Championships. And she offered me a job and I couldn’t take it because I was going to university.
But I did go and work for her during my summer vacations and rode all sorts of different horses for her. She was a very strict disciplinarian. She was tough to work for. But I learnt a huge amount. But also a big bonus was whilst I was there, Jacques Lagof, who was the American chef to keep at the time, and Bruce Davidson came over on a buying trip.
They rode some horses in front of them which they subsequently bought. These were off the track thoroughbreds. And then once I graduated as a veterinarian, I was fortunately enough to come to New Bolton Centre, the University of Pennsylvania, to work as an intern. And very soon after I arrived, Bruce Davidson brought in his current world champion Mt and he recognised me and said do you want to come and ride horses for me when you have time? So I said yes.
So that gave me the opportunity to continue riding whilst I was in the United States and I was there for two years, which was fabulous in terms of the experience of riding more new horses, watching Bruce work horses and watching other people come to give clinics there. It was a gainer learning experience. And also whilst I was in the United States, I was fortunate enough to meet Dan Marks, who was at the time the American Show Jumping Team vet, who had a very close relationship with George Morris. And he used to take me along at spare weekends to go and watch horses, train with George Morris and also do some veterinary work as well. So that continued my learning experience with the competition side of horses and exposed me to all sorts of good riders, good trainers, all of which I think you can pick up from and meld it all together is in terms of the work that I’ve done as an equine veterinarian specialising in orthopedics and poor performance.
So lameless and poor performance. That’s incredible, and although I want to get into the nitty gritty of soundness and whatnot in Performance Forces, you clearly were a very competent writer. Top writers don’t typically just offer anyone a job. What made you choose veterinary medicine instead of something like becoming a professional rider? I didn’t come from an equine background and my parents were really anti me following an equine career, particularly my father who said you should have forces as your hobby and not as your jaw.
And to be honest, I probably was didn’t have enough of the killer instinct to be a good professional rider. I was a bit of a perfectionist. I was always wanting the horse to have a good time. I would want to see the horse progress. My mother would say why didn’t you go fast across country?
You could have won and I would say I was third. The horse had a really good time. I really think the horse has made progress as part of this learning experience in his career. But it was at the time when you had to carry a minimum weight in three day venting and even in one day venting down to intermediate level. I felt that was a big disadvantage over the horses because if the horse made a mistake, if you’re a big rider, you can adjust your position in order to help the horse recover.
When the horse is carrying a load of extra lead weight, it’s much more difficult for them. So I felt that I was at a disadvantage there as well. So there was a combination of factors, but I hadn’t had a lifelong ambition to be at an equine veterinarian. It was only when I was at the latter stages of high school that I thought, what am I going to do? So then when I did go to vet school, it was with the sole purpose of being an equine veterinarian, and I never had any thought about doing anything else.
Awesome yeah that’s so many times coming on this podcast I will be chatting with someone and they’ll say something like that and I go but made you choose this choice and obviously you’ve made great impact with it. But life always could have looked so different depending on the path that we follow. So you have developed this ridden horse pain ethogram and for people who aren’t, that’s what does that mean? And on top of that, what are some of the more common signs of pain that we would see in horses based on that? The scientific term is ridden horse pain is a brown, but I like to use it the term ridden horse performance checklist when I’m talking to riders and trainers because I think that’s more understandable.
We had to use the term ethogram because that’s a scientific term relating to a number of behaviours, each of which have strict definitions. So for example, mouth open, win, separation of the teeth for 10 seconds or more, that’s one of the behaviours. The ridden horse Performance checklist is a list of 24 behaviours. The majority we have demonstrated are at least 10 times or more likely to be seen in a horse with underlying musculoskeletal pain than a non lame horse and it is the total score Act of 24 that’s important. We know from substantial evidence now that if a horse scores 8 or more of these 24 behaviours then it is highly likely to have underlying musculoskeletal pain.
It doesn’t tell us where the pain is coming. It enables us to identify the likely presence of pain. There are some lame horses which will score less than 8, but I’ve never seen a horse which has scored eight or more which hasn’t been a horse with musculoskeletal pain. And I think it it was developed because I was very aware that many riders and trainers are poor recognizing lameness, particularly hind limb lameness, and most especially if it’s involving both hind limbs. So the horse doesn’t actually limb, it just has failure of hind push or it’s performing less well.
And people were not recognizing that. And therefore when they were presented for investigation, they’d often developed secondary problems, either lameless in another limb or they’d lost muscle over the top line and the neck because of the way in which they compromised their movement. So you were getting into a vicious circle of multiple problems. So the aim was to try to develop a system whereby riders and trainers and also veterinarians could identify the presence of pain earlier on so that with the appropriate investigation and targeted treatment and management, we could get those horses back into work more successfully and more quickly with better long term results. And we could also use it to say actually this horse is only scoring 3 out of 24.
It’s likely to be a comfortable horse or you can use it in the situation when you’re thinking about buying a horse, you’ve seen a video of it and you see it’s showing all sorts of abnormal behaviours. It’s pinning its ears back for five seconds or more, it’s swishing its tail repeatedly, it’s struggling in the canter, it keeps breaking from canter to trot. And if it’s showing 8 or more of the behaviours, there’s no point in going to look at that or horse has got a problem. So why buy and problem? So we can use it in all sorts of different ways and you can use it in a situation when the rider is saying I’m just not making progress.
The horses struggling to do shoulder in on the left rein, he seemed to be OK otherwise, but that’s because they failed to recognize that actually the horse is uncomfortable. And this isn’t a training problem, it’s a problem because the horse is uncomfortable. So it helps you to differentiate between a training problem and a problem that is pain induced. But that it’s so interesting because as I was looking through the list, it’s like, oh, I know a horse who’s like checking all these boxes and we haven’t been able to quite figure out what’s been going on with them even with that help. And I was like, at least now I can definitely say I think there’s some pain going on and we can stop training it to try to be better and we can actually start working towards getting it better.
Absolutely. And I think we should add that I think it’s really important that we encourage veterinarians to see horses ridden because the absence of lameness in straight lines or on the lunge does not preclude the presence of lameness when rid. And if the veterinarian just sees the horse in hand and on the lunge and says I can’t see any lameness, the problem must be behavioural, that then he’s missing a lot if you must evaluate horses ridden. And then we have to try to determine the sources of pain using nerve block techniques to desensitize the limb in various levels and find out where the sources of pain are coming from. And why would a horse be different from like non ridden evaluation to ridden evaluation?
There are lots of different reasons. The horse can move as it wants to when it’s in hand and on the whereas when it’s ridden it has to balance itself and balance with the rider. It’s got the added weight of the rider and it is usually being asked to do more demanding movements, even if it’s just repetitive service that’s more demanding than with a rider on. It’s more demanding than on the lunge. And obviously you’ve got the interaction of the attack as well.
But it is very common to see lameless in probably in more than 40% of horses that look OK in hand will actually show lameless wind. So how does tack is always a thing of how does tack and maybe even riders in tack influence the way a horse goes and whether or not a horse. I’ve had horses who had a mystery lameness and one day I decided to ride and bareback and see what happens and all of a sudden the headline goes away. You go Oh my God, I the saddle fits fine, but it’s clearly just the way they feel with the saddle moving. And so how do things like that in interfere with the way a force goes naturally?
Well, first, I think it’s really important to recognize there’s a lot of saddles are not ideally fitted. In a recent study that we did looking prospectively as 150 horses that presented for port performance evaluation, 37% had saddles that were not ideally fitted. They were in performance and of those, 37 percent or she had their saddle fitted professionally or checked professionally within the last two to three months. So a professionally checked saddle fit does not equate with a correctly fitted saddle. And all of these horses when the saddle was changed to a better fitting saddle, improved in their performance.
It didn’t make them normal because they also had underlying other problems. But in the saddle is hugely influential, not just for the force but also for the rider. Because conventionally as riders we need to sit in balance with the horse. So our weight distribution needs to be centred over the horses centre of gravity. So that’s about the level of the 13th thoracic vertebra.
And if our weight distribution is too far back, then that is going to compromise the movement capabilities of the horse and create some degree of discomfort too and will make it also more difficult for the rider to be in balance, which is going to have a negative effect on the horse. And so I think that the saddle fit for both the horse and the rider are hugely important. And I think 1 tends to underestimate also the importance of bridle fit. You see so many bridles with really long cheap pieces so that the buckles are really close to the temporomandibular joints and that can affect performance. Horses which have got headpieces that are too tight or brow bands that are too tight or nose bands that are too tight all have the potential to negatively impact on performance, particularly things like step length.
So good tack fit is hugely important. So how do we know that our saddle fitting professional is actually like competent at their job? That’s a very good question because in the United States you don’t have any form of professional training and examination, whereas in the UK we have the Society of Master Saddles, Saddles who run a training course and do an examination system and then you become qualified under their auspices. That doesn’t mean that they’re all good saddle fitters, but at least they’ve gone through fairly lengthy, extensive training and apprenticeship, whereas in the USA it’s rather different. Whereas there are some very short courses, many people just set themselves up as a saddle fitter without much professional background in terms of training.
So I mean, I think there’s some very basic principles. Does the saddle fitter evaluate you ride the horse? Because if they don’t, then they’re not doing a good enough job because the saddle has got to fit both the horse and you. And that can only be assessed by then evaluating you ride the horse. And that’s not just sitting on the horse, it’s actually doing active things with the horse.
And there’s very simple things like watching the saddle. Do you appreciate abnormal movement of the saddle? The saddle at the back shouldn’t bounce up and down. It shouldn’t be oscillating from side to side. If it’s doing either of those things, or if it’s slipping consistently to one side, something’s not right.
Can I get at least two fingers underneath the pommel of the saddle whilst I’m standing in the stirrups? If I can’t, then that indicates that the pommel is too low and there is the potential for the pommel to be impacting on the spinous processes. Does the saddle fitter evaluate the width of the gullet relative to the width of your horse’s back? So is there enough space for the spinous processes and the associated vasculature? Because if they’re not evaluating the width of the gullet, they’re not properly assessing the saddle.
There are lots and lots of things and I realise it’s a minefield and it’s much more easy for me to say to somebody your saddle is a problem and I can demonstrate that by putting on a better fitting saddle and saying see the way the horse moves now, it’s obviously much better. It’s more difficult to get the saddle fitter to provide you with a saddle because often saddle fitters and sellers only have a limited range of stock and they are going to be inclined not to say I haven’t got anything suitable for your horse. They’re going to say this is the best I’ve got, but the best that they have is not necessarily what is ideal for your horse. Yeah, saddles that didn’t work for one horse work great for another. Brands work great for another horse.
And so I think it really does depend on how well of a fit in general. It doesn’t matter what kind of tree you have. If both of them don’t fit, it doesn’t really matter. No, absolutely. I would say that the close contact saddles are probably the most difficult to fit, particularly because horses change in their shape throughout the year depending upon their work, whether or not they’re getting turned out, how much grass they’re eating, if they have to have time off for some other problem.
The close contact saddles are nice for a ride. If it’s this is nice to feel that closeness to the horses back, they are challenging to fit correctly. I know specifically for me, I event and so I have the forward flap, cross country saddle and I’ve had horses really struggle with the forward flap really be problematic for them because of the way their shoulder is shaped or whatever. And so that’s definitely been a new thing I’ve had to deal with the amount of horses I see now versus when I was just a rider for my own 2 thoroughbreds. They’re pretty basic.
Why are some things maybe overall, that may limit a horse’s athletic career? I think lack of attention to detail in terms of the quality of trimming and shoeing from a very early age. And I’m talking about trimming from weeks of age. Lots of falls don’t have their feet trimmed from soon enough. The sooner you start trimming their feet, the better limb confirmation they’re going to finish up with.
Then I think there is the tendency to ride horses in confined areas on a repetitive basis without thinking about the effect of repetitive training in a fixed environment, doing the same movements over and over again which are going to result in repetitive strain type injuries and also what happens to the horses mental well-being as well. And I think for longevity we have to have cross training and in the event world we’re doing that anyway because the horses are doing both dressage cross country fitness work and training for show jumping. So they’re doing a variety of different work on a variety of different surfaces, which is fantastic. But for a dressage horse, for example, they by and large are going round, round an endless circle without any break. There’s often a tendency to overtrain rather than thinking the horse needs time to stretch and relax.
And if if an exercise is not improving after three repetitions, you probably need to go away and do something else for a while, not keep endlessly repeating those bad movements. And I think that we haven’t historically been quick enough to recognise low grade lamas. So what is it have been kept going? And then they become labeled as sour or unwilling or grumpy or stressy. Because when the horses react differently to pain, some become very hyper reactive, whereas others just switch off and say I don’t want to go.
That has not been recognised as reflecting underlying discomfort. One of the reasons is because we see this so much of the time, it has become completely normalised. If you learn to ride at a riding school, most of the riding school horses have got low grade problems and therefore they show behavioural signs of pain. Like opening their mouths, having to kick them, swishing their tails. So those behaviours become normalised.
We don’t think that they are abnormal, whereas in fact they are abnormal. So we don’t recognise those early problems, but we should be recognising them because the sooner we recognise them, the more likely we are to be able to manage them appropriately. And then there’s this culture of maintenance injections. Yes, Which to me are completely without foundation. If you’ve got a known problem like you know the horse has got lower fock joint osteoarthritis which is successfully improved by intraarticular medication, then it is reasonable to consider the fact that you will need to repeat that medication on a fairly regular basis to prevent that lameness occurring.
But if the horse has had no history of Hock related problems and it has not been proven that it’s before it’s declining performance is related to Hock pain, there is very little value in treating the hocks, the stifles and the fetlocks at the same time because then you’re overloading the horse with drugs. You don’t know which injection has been successful. You are just effectively pouring money into the horse without knowing what’s going on. So in my opinion, I think that if there is a problem, we need to identify the source of the problem and therefore treat that in a targeted way and perhaps change the management in some way. And if the horse is actually performing absolutely fine, there is no clinical indication in my view to be injecting joints because that’s not going to prevent disease.
There’s absolutely no evidence to prevent disease. We should be using those treatments for when we have a problem. So I think that’s really important. And one other factor I think that with respect to the development of problems is the fact that you have big show centres when horses are competing day after day and they’re not getting adequate recovery time. So if they pick up a low grade injury, instead of them having several easy days through which they could probably recover from that minor in, they kept going and they kept going.
And my philosophy is that just because it’s a competition there doesn’t mean you should be going to that competition day after day. The horses need breaks, they need to do other stuff and that’s really important to recognise. You wouldn’t have a human athlete running the 100 metres on successive day after day because they realise that the energy they put in and the stress that they put on their bodies for the 100 metres, if they’re successful, it needs recovery time. What does recovery look like in horses? What are some things that we say we are?
Because I know in the US there there will be like 2 week long shows for the hunter jumper stuff, right? And so you may go and even if you don’t compete every day, your horse might be stalled for like that whole time. So if you’re in that environment, how often should you be like hand walking? How long should they stay in the stall? Does the stall help with recovery?
No, it’s no, it doesn’t. No human athlete would be sitting or standing in a room for 23 hours or 24. They would be mobilizing themselves and the same applies to the horse. So if you see our upper end level athletes, it’s currently the European Dressage Championships, our riders or their grooms will have the horses out of the stall walking around, hand grazing and doing that for a large proportion of. And that’s really important because horses are inherently grazers.
They need to be eating more or less all the time when they’re not working because that’s going to be good for their gastric health. It’s going to be good for production of saliva. The saliva is going to have a buffering effect on the acids in the stomach which is going to reduce the risk of gastric ulcer syndrome. So those and from a mental health point of view for the horses to be out and socialising with other horses is also important. Being stuck in a small stall and many of the stalls at horse shows are too small relative to the size of the horses not being able to see their Comm specifics they had there is a problem.
Now in the ideal world we’d have all sorts of small turn out paddocks, social sites, but we won’t have that. I don’t. But we can adjust by spending a lot of time walking and raising walking. And there’s nothing wrong with just hacking the horse around the shape. So riding the horse but not putting it under pressure.
It’s just walking. Perhaps some long stretches and trots without drilling the horse. And how long? Say you do a mid level jumping effort, 3 foot or 1m, we’ll say how long I guess until that force is recovered from that where like they can, you know, maybe they don’t show the next day, but maybe they’re good to show the day after or whatnot. That depends on the number of factors in terms of the baseline fitness, their athletic ability, so how easy they find it to jump that 1m course.
Because they are jumping, that’s at the limit of their athletic ability. That’s far more challenging for them than a horse which is innately more talented and it’s finding it really easy to jump the one, which of course, and it’s also going to depend on the quality of the riding. So if the rider has hit all her strides or he or she and the horse has had a really easy time, that’s great because the horse will probably not have sustained any untoward event after that. But if the rider missed a distance and the horse really had to stretch or got in really deep and had to really struggle to, to clear the fencer, get over the fence with or without clearing it, then that’s more likely to have created some subclinical injury which will take longer to recover from. So it does depend on a little bit on the circumstances and also on the footing, the quality of the footing, because that will make a difference as well.
I know there’s a lot of talk right now about these artificial rings and the footing. How does that influence? I’ve had the experience of my horse goes a certain way and then I bring them to this venue and the footing is different and then all of a sudden I’m riding a way different horse so. That that is why the principle of cross training is important that you are working horses on a day-to-day basis on a variety of different surfaces so that they can develop the ability to work on different surfaces. But in saying that, there are some horses that hate loose footing, there are other horses that hate hard footing.
So there are going to be individual variations which have to be taken into account. We know that footing is hugely important. For example, when the Olympic Games were in Athens in Greece, there was a huge cluster of serious injuries amongst the upper level jumpers. They looked at the arena characteristics and the quality of the footing and the way in which the arena had been created and they realized there were problems with that. Since then there’s been much more research done on what are the more ideal characteristics for footing, but I think having spent some time in the USA, the East Coast and the West Coast and the bit in the middle seemed to vary in terms of the footing and that has to be taken into account as well.
You’ve spoken a lot on how good riding is basically good medicine for the horses. How? Can correct training and good biomechanical training offset confirmation flaws or physical challenges in horses I. Think that’s a really good question and I think it’s a very important question which is often overlooked because we see a huge tendency at all levels for horses to be ridden with their heads behind the vertical, particularly when they’re doing flat work or training for the dressage. So they’ve got their head behind the vertical, then as a result of that they cannot properly engage the muscles thoracic sling and they cannot properly move through their backs and the consequence, they cannot properly push from behind.
So they finish up with this horse with a restricted gait both in trot and in cancer. The cancer often loses a suspension phase just because the horse is not going forwards enough and is not being allowed to develop its musculature in the appropriate way. And I think that this is an important factor with respect to predisposition to the development of blameless problems. So for me the way in which the horses are worked on a day-to-day basis is of huge importance. If you look at the prevalence or clinically significant impinging spinous processes or kissing spines, we will see time and time again that this is not a problem for the upper level riders because the way in which they’re working the horses back muscle development is such that they just don’t have a problem.
But the horse which is being ridden such that it’s got extension of the back and the ride are not truly in balance and not working the horse always enough. Those horses finish up with chronic back pain and these spinous processes being close together may be influential in that. So it’s very important to me. And also having the walls balance, the training must be progressive. And this is something which perhaps is not fully acknowledged, particularly in the dressage world.
When you take for example, this exuberant young 3 year old with incredibly flamboyant paces and which has a natural ability to passage for example. And therefore the horse is put under too much pressure to passage too early when it hasn’t got the requisite musculoskeletal strength and coordination to properly support that. And therefore it’s going to likely to be overexerted and therefore get injured early. And early injuries are going to predispose potentially to later injuries as well. So the quality of training right from the outset is very important, but you also have to bear in mind that you’ve got some professional riders who have the ability to get the maximum out of a horse and make it look very good and cover up problems.
And that’s probably not good for the horse’s longevity because they’re not going slowly enough and progressively enough. There is this tendency to do too much too soon and take advantage of the horse’s natural characteristics without realising the importance of going slowly and developing the masculine skeletal strength and coordination that’s needed for good competitive performance. And so if you were, I know it’s really hard to give generalizations in our world. One, I’m assuming when you say go slowly, you’re not necessarily talking about speed and the speed at which the horse is going. Though I’m talking about making incremental changes in the aesthetic demands that are in place on the horse.
So if for example, this horse that has naturally got a very good extended trot, extended trot results in hyper extension that is oversinking of the fetlocks. That oversinking of the fetlocks is going to put incredible strain on the suspensory apparatus and predispose to repetitive overload of the suspensory apparatus and therefore injury. So if the horse naturally can do a good extended trot, we don’t need to be training the horse in extended trot. We need to be moving away from that and doing the exercises that are going to build up its strengths so that ultimately when we want to do extended trots in a competition arena, we’re going to be able to do it in balance and easily. So just because a horse offers you something that is good, it doesn’t necessarily or means probably you shouldn’t be overly training that.
You should be avoiding that to some extent. If a horse has got good technique, you don’t need to be jumping over lots of big fences. You need to be improving its gymnastic ability, so doing gymnastic exercises over small fences, but you don’t need to be training over big fences day after day. Now the rider may need to be training to get their eye in, but that’s a different story. Then we have balance between what’s good for the rider and what’s good for the.
Horse. And so when we’re talking about, let’s say just about developing an event horse, because I think it does mesh, you can take something from the dressage and you can take something from the show jumping. I. Typically for rule of thumb when I’m developing a horse, I think a level a year, right, because it gives them time to develop strength. The young horses beginner novice or are little levels and so I think it gives them time to mature in the competition setting without necessarily putting strain on them.
But are there when do you think if you had your perfect world of equine competition and whatnot, when are we starting horses, how long are they at each sort of stage and how long does it take to say develop to for the average rider will say our preliminary or your guys’s obvious? I think that depends hugely on the whole because some horses seem to mature physically and mentally more quickly than others. So some horses may be ready to start groundwork as a three-year old, whereas others are not going to be ready till they’re four and therefore they’re going to be probably a year behind as they go forwards. I think that a well produced horse now, and I’m talking about now rather than 40 years ago because Nobbies courses certainly in the UK become much more technically demanding than they were 40 years ago. I would say a well produced horse should be able to do that as a six year old.
It’s starting at 3 or 4. OK. Interesting. Sometimes be some bosses that will have to start later and they won’t develop as quickly. You have to go more slowly and it does depend also a little bit on their athletic ability in terms of how easy they find it.
Is it? Yeah, it’s. Confident you are as a rider, isn’t it? That’s going to have a big influence as well. I do a lot of work with off the track thoroughbred, so typically when they’ve come to me like they’ve already worked one career.
And so I don’t necessarily ever choose, OK, we’re going to start this one as a three-year old or we’re going to. They come to me pretty much already going. But I’ve gotten more into developing young horses and whatnot. Yeah, You really see the range of at 3, this thing was ready to get to work, and this thing is 4 1/2 and it’s in the middle of a growth spurt and it’s a bit immature and we’ll start groundwork, but I don’t think anyone’s going to sit on it for a little while. And it’s so hard to make generalizations because they really are all so different.
Yeah, but we have young event horse classes in the UK for four and five year olds. They compete at the separate age groups and the spectrum of horses that you see at the regional competitions among just the four year olds or among the five year olds is enormous. At the championships the spread is less enormous but still there is a big spread and you will have a few of them which are have have as five year olds competed at novice level, but mostly they are with professional producers rather than amateur producers. So if you could tell riders to do this one thing, maybe daily, to improve the comfort and career length of their horses, what would that thing be? Going out in the countryside and hacking because I think you can do an enormous amount of training whilst you’re out in the countryside and the horse not being subjected to going round and round in circles.
And I spoke to a podcast about for American show jumpers a few months ago and they said we don’t, we wouldn’t dare to go out hacking. And I said even if you need to, that’s from a physical and mental point of view, from the horses perspective. And yeah, I think that’s hugely important and we cannot underestimate what we can do from a training perspective. Out on a trail ride, a horse is not going on perfect footing all the time, it’s going on uneven ground, it’s going on a slight slope and that’s all developing the horses proprioceptive function, knowing where their limbs are. So the messages are going quite subconsciously from the feet up to the horses brain and then back from the brain to coordinate the movement of the limbs.
And to do that on a variety of different terrains, not just on a perfect surface is of huge benefit to horses To develop this proprioceptive function and also to develop the strengths in the ligament supporting joints for example. That is enormously important I think. And we we tend to almost mollycoddle horses. They need also to learn to think for themselves. They need to learn how to place their feet.
So they need to be stepping over logs, they need to be stepping down steps, several steps, learning to think for themselves. Because if we regiment their work too much, and there is a tendency to do that as plus country horses become more and more technical, then the horses lose that ability to have that third leg or fifth leg, I should say, and think for themselves and get themselves out of trouble. Because most of us who have been amateur riders are going to make mistakes and the horse has got to be able to help us get out of those mistakes. And if we’ve been too disciplined with them all the time and not allowed them to step over those logs going down a hill, go over those roughs, cobblestones, you may think that’s not good for the horse, but actually it is good for the horse. Yeah, I remember a few years ago I had this friend who had this really talented thoroughbred and she had actually trained him up to I think pre Saint George dressage and he was an event horse.
I remember he started having a lot of issues on cross country and she always was saying she’s, it’s like he’s waiting for me to pick the distance and do the thinking for him. So we basically don’t make it. And I have a client who breeds hunter jumpers in the US and. I do a lot of work with her young horses and actually most of what I do is just taking them out on trail and teaching them lateral work and having them step over logs. And she goes and she wins everything.
And I don’t necessarily think it’s because I’m sitting there hacking, but I think it’s because they spend so much time not in the arena that the arena is actually still fun and they enjoy it. But they also get such a reprieve from needing to put 8 strides in this line, and that becomes so mundane to them, I think. And then you get boredom problems, specifically with the young horses. Where do you see the biggest opportunity for improving equine welfare in sport over the next 5 or 10 years? I think that’s a very good question because there’s a huge debate about the social license to operate.
It’s our public acceptance of what we do and there’s a huge dichotomy amongst the horse world, which is a big problem to me in that you’ve got those people who would saying all dressage is bad, we should never use a double bridle, we should never use spurs, we should never use the whip. Jumping horses over 1 meter 60 is not right. And then you have the people who say all horse efforts and we should. And these are fairly vocal people from both ends of the spectrum. I have the philosophy that I think that horses actually doing enjoy working and progressing, assuming that they get time for socialization as well.
But I think that we have to acknowledge that we have some problems in our sports, and we have to hold up our hands and admit where those problems are and be seen to be doing something about it. And paradoxically, although it’s the upper end of the competition world that gets all the criticism, it’s actually at the bottom end of the competition world that we have more problems. So we applied the Ridden Horse Performance checklist to horses competing at 5 star three day events and World Cup Grand Prix dressage qualifiers and lower level Grand Prix dressage and also at the basic levels of eventing British eventing 9100 and novice. So jumping between fences between 80 centimetres and 1 metre 10. And at the top end of the sports, the Ridden horse pain for performance scores were on average between 2:00 and 4:00 with a very occasional horse that had a high score.
And when we looked at the presence or absence of lameness, it was a very small percentage and often only seen under specialised circumstances like right shoulder Lin or right off pass or something like that. Whereas when we looked at the lower level event horses, we had a far bigger spectrum of performance checklist scores, with some horses scoring as high as 12 and showing overt lameness and showing obvious signs of not wanting to go. So this epitomises to me that we have a much bigger problem at the lower levels there. Therefore, we have to address this through education and that means educating the trainers as well as the riders and also the owners. Because I think particularly in the US, when you have so many riders that train in a barn underneath the auspices of a trainer, then the trainer wants to keep those horses and riders from a financial point of view.
So it doesn’t make it much commercial sense to him to recognise that there is a problem. But we need to get the knowledge that there is a problem and be seen to do something about it. So we have to open the trainer’s eyes to the fact that it’s no good just keeping going with this horse. We have to say this horse is clearly uncomfortable, we need to intervene and do something about this. And then I think that it’s clear that within each of the disciplines, the stewards probably need to have more authority to act.
And I discuss this because I’m on the US Eventing Safety Committee and we review video footage of horses and clearly there are horses being ridden to fatigue and they haven’t been stopped. So this is a problem, but it also relates to rider education and teaching people when they need to say enough is enough, I need to stop. And this comes to a head when there’s a fatality of either a horse or a rider. Then we have these reviews of what’s happened and he says we must do something about this and then often nothing does happen. I actually got injured over the winter and I live in Aiken, SC, so our winter season is our bank season here.
And so I spent a lot of time volunteering at events and the amount of times I radioed in this horse looks tired or this rider is really having to like work hard for this. I was like towards the back half of the course, pretty much nothing happened in any of those accounts. But I realized I’m a trainer, I’m a professional. Like I can see the signs of fatigue. A lot of these people are parents or just people that really don’t even know the sport or horses at all.
They’re not necessarily doing anything wrong, but they just don’t really know what to look for. And the volunteer briefings before everyone gets sent out really don’t talk about the things that you should look for. It talks about what do you do if a rider falls off or what do you do if you have to hold a horse and rider. These are the things that you should be looking for in terms of like how the horse is going or how the rider is trying to influence the horse. Which I thought was definitely something that could be improved upon in terms of just the volunteer system, but also going back to what you had said about the pain in the lower level forces.
I I have been thinking through this for a while because I think especially in the United States, we’re in such a weird system where the lower levels of eventing are basically paying for the top level riders. I. Pretty much never see professional riders striking their forces or getting too super emotional. If you have a bad ride, you might be emotional, but you’re not getting emotional at the horse. Or it does happen, but at a much lesser level than I see amateurs or young riders and the way they interact with their horses.
And it it’s so hard because so many professionals almost feel like they can’t say anything. And because then what happens to these are my owners or these are my clients? And it really does create such a trap of how do we breakthrough any of this to allow because riders, if you’re riding a horse that’s in pain or a horse that just doesn’t want to do the job for whatever reason, it’s not fun. No. I’m obviously astonished how people will pursue riding a horse which really doesn’t want to do it without asking the question why.
There seems to be this lack of curiosity, which again goes back to the way we were being conditioned. We’ve been conditioned that if the horse stops, we hit it. Now that that doesn’t make sense from a learning perspective. Why is a horse supposed to understand why it’s being hit? It might feel fear and it may jump because it’s frightened, and it might get a better experience because of that, assuming that the rider didn’t get left behind.
But if the rider got left behind, then the horse then has another negative experience because it got jagged in the mouse. You’ve got a bad situation being perpetuated. I think it’s very difficult to know how to educate people better and to cross these communication barriers. What it is, They’re communication barriers, but we need to lead somebody. People need to lead by example.
It would need one good trainer to do something different and then for his group of clients to ultimately show they’re getting better results. And that would be a way of turning this liner slightly to one side. So this big ship going in this direction, we might just be able to shift it a little bit in an opposite direction. But it has to be by example, I think, because that’s what does make a difference. Leading by example.
So for example, whatever you think about Charlotte Dujardas when she rode with a helmet at the 2012 London Olympics, that transformed the use of helmets. And nobody now rides mostly without. Yes. So that was one key person leading by example. And that just shows what a powerful person can achieve.
Yeah, there. This whole topic of equine welfare in sports specifically is just such a large topic, but I think just improving the way horses go improves so many of the other issues that we see overall. Absolutely. People realized how much better a horse would perform if it was pain free and how much it would be more easy for you to ride that horse. And how you?
Would be so much more comfortable on that horse. But if you’ve ridden a horse which had a problem before it’s had nerve blocks and after it’s had nerve blocks and you felt the transformation in this horse’s ride ability and its willingness and the quality of movement through its body. You can’t forget that experience. And I would love everybody to go through that experience so they would know what a normal horse should really feel like. Because I think that many riders have never actually had the good fortune to ride a pain free horse and therefore they are just attuned to this being the normal when it’s not all.
And even many professional riders are riding horses with low grade problems, but can circumvent that to an extent by their quality of riding and their balance and their strengths. This has been an extremely informative conversation. How do people follow along with what you do to see your stuff? All of that, sort of. I’m not active on social media.
There is a website, 24 Horse behaviours.org where there’s lots of educational material about the Ridden Horse Performance Checklist and all sorts of other commentaries about common problems. And I also liaise with Train With Trust when we do monthly discussions about various topics which are broadcast on YouTube and through Facebook Live. Thank you so much for joining me. This is great. You’re very welcome, it’s been a pleasure.