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Truman said:

> And as amazing as the horse is in it's biomechanics he still has to
> answer to Mother Nature. Double the mass he has to carry - he has to to
> twice as much work and expend twice as much energy. Mother Nature makes
> an exception for no one - no matter how good their equitation.

I don't know if you would believe Hillary Clayton over me, but one of the things that she has found in her studies of equine biomechanics (as a member of USDF I get some of her regular reports in their magazine and to see her presentations at their convention), is that one of the things that horses do on every stride (and to differing degrees) is brake (i.e. slow themselves down so they have to accelerate again).  Most of this braking is done with the front legs (generally speaking, the back legs are the accelerator, the front legs are the brakes), so the heavier the horse is on the forehand, the more braking it does on every stride, and consequently the more accelerating it has to do to maintain forward motion (and it is acceleration that costs energy to achieve).  And one of the other things she has found is that the degree to which a horse brakes with its front feet is very much a function of the placement of the feet, especially the hind feet.  And the placement of a horse's feet is very much affected by where the rider asks the horse to place its feet.

So.  People with "good equitation" can, indeed, substantially reduce the work that a horse has to perform to propel itself forward, simply by having the horse place its feet differently during the phases of the stride so that it does less braking.

This is no different than people who can get better gas mileage out of their cars by driving in such a way as to avoid acceleration and deceleration as much as possible.  Truman would have us believe that there is no cheating Mother Nature, so it is going to take the same amount of fuel to propel a car down the road no matter who is driving and how they drive...what drivel.

Hillary Clayton will be the first person to tell you that rider equitation has a huge impact on the way horses move and consequently the amount of work they have to do in order to propel themselves forward.  Just jerking your horse in the mouth with the reins will have an effect.

kat
Orange County, Calif.

p.s. The idiotic comment about horses doing twice the work because they are carrying twice the load coupled with the fact that Truman IS a physicist (so he has to understand fully that the weight of the horse itself is part of the load and we aren't talking about horses having to carry 1000 pound riders) and from the reports I have had from people who have met him that he is not an idiot suggests that he is so narrow-minded about this topic that he is willing to ignore the obvious, or he thinks we are all too stupid to know that the weight of the horse is part of the load.  Lots of people are naive enough about mechanics that they don't think of the weight of the horse as part of the load that has to be moved (although if they have ever shopped for a truck to pull their horse trailer and have had to think about GVWR they should), but Truman shouldn't fall into this category.  It is, for this reason, that I have little faith in Truman's statements or analyses with respect to this issue.  He is either so blinded by his bias that he is willing to make an extremely novice mistake or he has such a strong agenda with respect to the issue that he is trying to deceive other people who he hopes will be fooled into making an extremely novice mistake.

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