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> Navajo Lady looks like she'd make a fine endurance horse.

I don't think doing Endurance would be a good idea for the Lady.  Despite 
her outward appearance, her body has suffered a terrible insult which 
certainly caused some irreparable damage internally.  Endurance is a taxing 
endeavor, so much so that while she might live comfortably into her 20's as 
a pleasure horse, the stresses of the sport could well push one system or 
another into complete failure much sooner.

The concept is called Lost Life Expectancy.  LLE can most easily be 
assessed when you look at the age of people who died as a direct result of 
some activity vs the average life expectancy for people in the same 
statistical group (age, sex, weight, smoker or non, etc).  It can also be 
quantified by studying how long people live who engage in an activity that 
poses a threat but does not result in immediate death, again vs the average 
for people in their group who do not indulge in that activity.  The basic 
idea is that every time you insult your body, you reduce your life 
expectancy.  The bigger the insult, the sooner you die, as opposed to when 
you would have died had you not suffered the trauma.

The story of Lady's brush with death AFTER her rescue illustrates the 
point.  Since she was in good hands at the time, it is reasonable to assume 
that she had access to sufficient water.  She simply failed to drink 
enough.  This failure in all likelihood would not have had such devastating 
consequences had she not nearly died of starvation almost 4 years earlier. 
 Certainly none of the neighbor's other horses, nor any of Bruce's, had a 
problem handling the reduced water intake brought on by the colder 
temperatures.

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