Re: RC: re: athletic horses

[CMKSAGEHIL@aol.com]

In a message dated Wed, 25 Jul 2001 12:38:50 PM Eastern Daylight Time, Trailrite@aol.com writes:

>  I'm going to have to disagree on this one...Just because one horse, or a   
> few horses, might have a problem with breathing due to a super dished face.   
> (??) This doesn't mean all dished faced horses are going to have this problem.  

Tammy is right.  Although I've known a few horses with respiratory difficulty that might be attributed to narrowed nasal passages, I've seen far too many equally "dishy" horses with no problems whatsoever.  I'd suspect that the ones with problems might have internal narrowing of the nasal passages that can't be visualized from the outside.  One thing I found interesting was when I started working with an equine dentist who had, prior to working for me, done mostly QH's.  She said that she was kind of dreading working on Arabs because of their smaller heads, as she found it sometimes difficult dealing with smaller-headed QH's due to lack of room in the mouth.  But when she started working on Arabs, she discovered that there was PLENTY of room in their mouths, because the dentition, etc., was all in proportion to the smaller head size, whereas the smaller-headed horses of larger breeds had simply had the heads bred down to the point that nothing much fit anymore.  By the same to!
ken, most dishy-faced Arabs have
 PLENTY of room in their nasal passages to pass a regular-sized nasogastric tube, for instance.

Heidi