Re: Soundness

[K S Swigart <katswig@deltanet.com>]

On Tue, 19 May 1998, Lauren Horn wrote:

> Has anyone ever had a horse, that they had all these high hopes for,
> just not make it because of unsoundness, and there was really no reason,
> that you could see for the unsoundness? You could train and as soon as
> you got to X miles per week they would be off. Then you lay them up, get
> them sound again, and it happens again at X miles. Are some horses just
> not meant to be ridden a lot?

Yes, and there may be any number of reasons for this, including but not
excluded to:

1) the horse is conformationally unsuited to undersaddle work

2) the horse had some early development problems that led to poor
development of the tissue required for undersaddle work

3) the horse had some old injury that has never and will never heal
completely and this injury "flares up" when a certain threshhold is
reached.

It is, however, also possible that there are problems with our "lay up,
bring it back to work" program.

kat
Orange County, Calif.