Hi Ridecampers! Thank you all for all the nice posts I have recieved. Wow my horse does look like Susan G.'s Horse too, as pictured on her website! I am starting to suspect that horses kind of look alike. This is because I brought pictures of my horses and my friends horses to work, and my friends say, 'How can you tell them apart?" Well aside from the fact that one of them has a penis, and the others don't , then there are the subtle nuances of grey, greyer, greyest, and the chestnut arab who doesn't quiet look like the Haflinger next door. But hey..they are "civilians", not horse people. So it's okay, I explain it patiently as we go along. Susan we could do Pas de deux, and get Laura's horse and do a Pas de ...tres? Anyway,
I got a lot of questions about the" horse and rider weight ratio". I thought, "uh oh, maybe I sounded like a bone-head". This is a little piece I picked up on archives of ridecamp back in June 23, 1998 and was so taken with it, I printed it and kept it so I could look at it all the time . Sorry I dont know how to direct you all to that website. In actuality it is probably irrelevant to me and my life, because unless I gain 150 lbs, or start riding a shetland, my numbers stay pretty low...i.e I am a small rider! But for heavy weight riders, I suspect it could be very important. I saw Susan Garlinghouse's name on that piece, but I didn't see it on her website. What it is...and I don't profess to teach you all her math and her research..you take the horse's weight, and your weight (include tack) and add them together. You measure the cannon bone, and divide the weight number in lbs. by the cannon measurement in inches. Then you divide it by two. Then You hope that your number is below 80 I guess (Susan can tell you for sure), but the highest I ever hit was 64, so I don't have to have anorexia or anything. (Now I'm so old, I would just buy a bigger horse, in my teens I might have tried to shrunk myself..see how nice it is to get older?) Then of course, the bone of the cannon can grow with LSD, and time which I know is true, because I have done and seen that. So then the horse can carry more weight...right? Okay nobody flame me now..ask Susan if this doesn't make sense. I won't even bring up the picture I saw of a horse that weighed about 1300 or more lbs, with about a 7" or less cannon, and how I wondered why people like the way that looks. Okay, thanks again friends! See you on the trails! Beth