Team Approach to Horse Management and Training Success

The farrier, veterinarian-chiropractor, massage specialist, or other "support professional" is not a horse trainer, and horse owners must not call on him or her to do what is morally and practically their job. It is up to the rider to straighten the horse, not the others mentioned; yet they too must understand straightness in order to support the horse owner and see to it, for example, that the animal is trimmed and shod properly. Because I view the whole process as a team effort, not only aspects of horse training but veterinary-chiropractic and farriery are all integrated in the article below.

Why You Should Study this Article

The version of "Woody" that you are reading here is the version that previously appeared in The Inner Horseman, with a more complete set of illustrations. We make this work available to all visitors to the ESI Website because it is ESSENTIAL for horse owners to understand straightness. An understanding of the "Woody" Paradigm of Straightness allows you to:

• Understand the underlying cause for a wide array of "training" problems such as difficulty getting the horse to take one lead, stiff to one side, drifts to one side of fences, lugs on one side of bit, difficulty obtaining lightness or collection, etc.
• Understand the underlying causes of a horse's need for massage or chiropractic treatment, and also why the masseuse or chiropractor selects the particular body zone(s) for treatment that he/she does
• Understand the origin of the classic "checkerboard" pattern often identified and treated by chiropracty and osteopathy
• Understand the underlying cause for many cases of apparent saddle mis-fit
• Understand the underlying cause for why you may be having "position trouble" in terms of one stirrup always longer, one shoulder always lower, etc., and why and to what extent "Centered Riding" or similar methodologies will be effective for you
• Understand the underlying cause for one front hoof being bigger and flatter (or smaller and steeper) than the other.
• Understand why front-leg lameness (including navicular disease, "club" foot, chronic bruising, chronic abscessing) and hindleg problems (such as stringhalt, "weak" haunch) tend to be exclusively manifested, or manifested to a greater extent, in one of the pair of limbs only.

This article is about how to help your horse to carry himself straight when you're riding him. It explains why he may not be carrying himself straight now, and what you, your farrier, veterinarian, and other "support" personnel whom you employ can contribute to helping him learn to carry himself consistently straight.

This article does not present a new way to do things. It doesn't tout a "method." It hasn"t been put forth in order to foster my reputation, or to cause you to become interested in the particular way I handle horses. No; what is going to happen here is something far more dangerous and far-reaching: it is going to change the way you see and the way you think as a horse owner, horse-handler, horse-shoer, horse-chiropractor, horse-veterinarian, horse-dentist, or horse alternative-care practitioner. The process starts with learning the meaning of the word paradigm (pronounced PAIR-a-dime).

Horsemanship (in all the aspects outlined above) could certainly qualify as one of the biological sciences. Horsemanship ought to be science as much as art and technique, and it belongs in the broad category of biology just as much as do the medical and quasi-medical sciences. Horseback riding and training has greatest affinities with such fields of endeavor as gymnastics (the harmonious development of the neuro-muscular and musculo-skeletal systems), and psychology (study of the mind and emotions and their functioning). The various fields commonly employed to "support" the ridden horse (chiropracty, farriery, massage, conformation study, "riding theory") are linked to physiotherapeutics (rehabilitation of injuries to the musculo-skeletal system), biomechanics and kinesiology (study of the golfer's swing or the runner's physical technique), and orthopedics (the science of correcting and preventing skeletal deformities).

The research and thinking which created this article started with consideration of farriery and its links to orthopedics, and I am going to use farriery here as a first example of horsemanship's relationship to science. The modern practice of farriery evolved from Roman times (the Romans invented the nailed horseshoe; they and other later cultures whose armies built or used roads made horseshoeing common by the Middle Ages).  Men who belonged to Medieval farriers' guilds swore initiates to secrecy regarding basics and special techniques. These same guilds gestated the first doctors of human and animal medicine. At one time long ago, the farrier, barber, dentist, doctor, and veterinarian could be one and the same person.

During the eighteenth century, however, doctors began to take on the characteristics of scientists. In doing this, they left the farriers behind. The story of how the American Medical Association, and the American Veterinary Medical Association in imitation of it, came to possess legal and political control of all therapeutic practices in the U.S. is one that can be left to another forum. I am not talking about law here, but science: the farriers were left behind. Why?

The answer is because the field of farriery lacks a paradigm. A paradigm is a set of governing ideas or principles which has the following characteristics:

(1) It makes sense - it is logically consistent.

(2) It is necessary to daily work. In other words, without a paradigm, the farrier cannot know why to proceed, and therefore does not know how to proceed. In the absence of paradigm, if good work happens, it happens by chance.

(3) It allows the farrier to make accurate predictions and to visualize outcomes, and therefore, to select the mode of treatment most appropriate for the animal at hand.

(4) It focuses laboratory and experimental research and makes it efficient.

In other words, if farriery operated from a paradigm as medical science, law, or engineering do, facts would no longer be gathered or reported at random; fundamentals would no longer have to be reviewed and argued at every meeting or in every published paper. Treatment options would no longer be presented as a mere encyclopedic list (vis., Doug Butler's textbooks), but would be grouped into families related directly to problems identified and explained by the paradigm. Empowered by a paradigm, farriers would no longer experience the "pendulum effect": swinging from one school of thought to another - this year Tony Gonzales' approach is "in", the next year Rick Redden's, the next year Jaimie Jackson or Gene Ovnicek or Bergie Bergson or Hilrud Strasser, and on and on. Many farriers are so sick of this that they have simply quit going to educational forums or meetings. What they have found is that each time they take up the approach to farriery which the currently-popular authority advocates (and all of these approaches have the power to benefit SOME horses), it "works" for some horses but not others. In the end, the farrier finds that the new approach "works" for about as many horses as the approach that he or she originally took. This is enough to make anyone throw their tools down in disgust.

That's the history and the link as far as farriery goes. But the same thing could be said for horse-training -- perhaps, more so. It too lacks a paradigm -- it lacks any agreed-upon set of governing ideas or principles. It too, is plagued with the random reporting of "facts" in isolation from causative context; it too is rife with conflicting "lists" or "methods" which purport to tell riders how to be effective (but which are, in fact, usually ineffective except for the person who first wrote them down); and it too is plagued by the "pendulum effect", with not only individual "stars" from year to year, but from decade to decade different styles or schools becoming the idol of the magazine trade and each being considered – for a time – as "the one right way" to train. And there are thousands of horse owners today who have "been through" Saddle Seat or Hunt Seat or Dressage, Western Pleasure or Reining, Centered Riding or T.E.A.M., "resistance-free" training or "natural horsemanship", and have found, in the end, one thing: it didn't work. Their horse still isn't a winner. He still pulls back when he's tied, he still doesn't go to the fence right, he still doesn't change leads, he still won't get into the trailer. Or, he performs – but without joy, or tensely and sketchily, or woodenly, or intermittently. And, like the farriers, these owners, who have spent money, time, and effort in quest of the "pleasure ride" it seems that they're never going to get, have thrown their bridles down in disgust.

Things tend to work better when the people involved with them understand how they work. That's what paradigms do: create – almost force – deeper understanding of the system under study. This article presents a paradigm applicable to all aspects of horsemanship science. Like many efforts that flow from paradigm, it contains a model. Since many people learn things better when they actually handle things, I very strongly urge you to build a "Woody" model for yourself (see photograph and blueprint included with this article ). Several horsemen who have been my students - and mind you, these are not beginners but seasoned professionals - have taken more than a year to "see" how the model works and what its implications are for the daily practice of riding, training, trimming and shoeing, chiropracty or acupuncture or massage. In the end, though, you will find that nothing about what I am offering you here is very difficult. Its very simplicity may make it seem difficult at first.

In other words, in order to "get" this you and your horse ARE going to have to work with it -- you are going to have to "live it." That means doing a little bit every day, until it becomes second nature.

Straightness must not be mechanically forced, either by the application of "stack-padded" shoes, or by strong aids coming from the rider. The horse should not be straightened in order to improve his performance, but in order to help him stand and move comfortably. In no case should treatment be given before proper assessment (diagnosis). In this particular application, that means: no one-sided padding, shims, rails, or wedges to be used either on the feet or under the saddle unless assessment based on orthopedic principles calls for them. Because every training technique is also (in some sense) a "treatment", it likewise means: no training technique is to be applied which is solely for the purpose of getting the horse "ready" to show.

The long way is the short way. If your objective is to show your horse, nothing given here will prevent you. You will indeed apply training techniques, but they will address the horse's actual needs, rather than your competitive goals. What I am here advising you to do will build the foundation of the house. I am not troubled about the finish of this house, because I know from experience with many horses that the "brackets" on which the filigree must be hung will develop and will, without fail, present themselves at the right time.

In other words, you do not need to worry whether the horse will slide-stop or change leads or go in a "frame" or carry his head properly for whatever division of competition you're hankering after, be it Western Pleasure or Park. You do not need to work at "developing impulsion," for impulsion does not come from physical thrusting but is instead one result of straightness. In fact, you do not even need to worry about straightening your horse! What you do need to concern yourself with is whether he carries himself straight.

RELATIONSHIP OF CALMNESS, SUPPLENESS, AND STRAIGHTNESS

No other physical competency is anywhere near as important as straightness. The rider's prime task is to learn to identify crookedness by feeling it and seeing it in the horse's body, and then to eliminate it by teaching the horse to move straight.

So: first things first. Before any horse can be straightened, he must first be calm and supple. In the absence of calmness, he cannot even be properly assessed. The priority order is therefore: calm, supple, straight, forward.

Suppleness means range of motion at the horse's joints. It must come before straightness in the course of training, because without suppleness the horse moves like a bar of iron; he cannot freely arrange the parts of his body. Helping the horse find suppleness is the rider's job. She can do it herself or employ therapists and veterinarians to help. It is very difficult to assess, trim, or shoe a stiff and crooked horse correctly because he does not use himself as nature meant for him to; his weight is not properly distributed on all four feet. When fear is added to the mix, even a horse that would otherwise have been reasonably straight and supple will present himself as stiff and crooked.

There is a physical side to crookedness as well as a psychological side. In this article, the physical causes for crookedness (and the most effective approach to eliminating it on a physical level) are discussed first. I finish, however, by discussing the more important matter of recognizing and eliminating the psychological-emotional causes.

STRAIGHTNESS DEFINED

For years, I labored to help students understand when their horses were going crooked by describing its symptoms, as in the list which appears below. Finally, however, I came up with an actual definition of straightness:

A horse is straight when his sternum (breastbone) is centered between his elbows (and shoulder joints).

When the horse is standing still, this definition can be taken literally. When moving, the horse's torso swings between his forelimbs with each step. When a straight horse moves in a symmetrical gait (walk, trot, or ambling "gait"), the distance of the torso"s swing to the right exactly equals the distance to the left, so that the right-hand swing exactly cancels the left-hand swing and the average position of the sternum is centered between the elbows.

The horse's ribcage is freer to swing between his forelimbs than yours would be if you got down on all fours and crawled. This is because horses lack collarbones. Your collarbones connect your sternum to your shoulder joints, and they act as struts which brace the sternum, centering it between your shoulder-joints. The horse has no such braces. There is no bony, socketed connection in the horse between the ribcage and any part of the forelimb. The equine forelimb is held onto the ribcage - and the ribcage is in turn cradled - entirely by soft tissues.

The horse's ribcage is, moreover, shaped the opposite of your own. Your ribcage is shallow from back to front (or top to bottom, if you bend over to crawl on all fours), whereas the horse's is shallow from side to side. The anterior part of the horse's ribcage is shaped similar to a canoe, with the sternum forming the prow and keel.

The scapula, or shoulder blade, glides over the ribcage with a circular motion similar to a hand cleaning a windshield. The contents of the horse's ribcage (heart, lungs, etc.) make it heavy. This weight falls into a sling composed primarily of the serratus and pectoral muscles. The fibers of these muscles originate upon the scapula and humerus (upper arm) bones of the forelimb, and extend downward and inward to the ribs and sternum. The sling or hammock-like arrangement of these fibers is mimicked in Woody by a band cut from a rubber inner tube.

When your horse goes straight, the weight and pull upon the muscle fibers forming the left side of this "thoracic sling" is exactly equal to the weight and pull upon those of the right side.

All educated, quality horsemanship seeks to ride the horse "from back to front." In order for thrust-energy to flow without inhibition from back to front through the horse's vertebral column, it is necessary that the bones composing this chain align themselves correctly. To ensure this, the horse's body must be positioned in movement so that both the sternum and the pubis (the center-bottom point of the horse's pelvis) trace the same track. An example from everyday life is when a train is moved forward by a locomotive positioned at the rear. The trouble for riders comes because the horse's movement is not constrained by a track. A horse is much "squirmier'"to drive forward from the rear than a train is, as anyone who has ever ground-driven a horse knows. Driving or riding a horse is like having a trackless train composed of several cars linked together and pushed from behind by an engine. To go straight, one must imagine that there is a hose projecting downward from the first and last cars. The vehicle must go forward in such a way that only one stripe is produced, whether the motion is forward or backward. Lateral motion produces parallel stripes.

There are thirty-two joints in a normal horse between the poll and the dock, of which five are absolutely incapable of lateral bending. That makes a "train" with twenty-seven joints which can contribute (however much or little; the amount varies within the chain of vertebrae) to following a curving path.

There is a slow-motion film clip that used to be shown to high-school biology classes. It was made to demonstrate why when a cat falls out of a tree, it almost always manages to land on its feet. To make the film, they set up the cameras outside a building and then threw the cat out of a third-story window (there was a trampoline for him to land on below).

The film first shows the cat tumbling as it falls. Immediately, it twists it head to right it. This effort is the product of a "righting reflex" which depends upon input to the brain from the eyes, which scan for the horizon-line, and from the semicircular canals or "balance organs" of the inner ears. The twist then propagates down the animal's spine as the hindquarters seek to square themselves behind the head.

The falling cat illustrates two facts of mammalian neurology which are germane to this discussion of straightness:

1. The hindquarters square themselves to the head, not to the shoulders.

2. The shoulders are independent of the head and hindquarters.

When a quadruped is standing upon the ground, the system works the same way: it is the shoulders, which can act independently of either the head or the hindquarters, which come out of alignment. The shoulders are more independent in a horse than in, for example, a cat or a dog, because cats and dogs have collarbones and horses don't. This gives horses an ability to lean - to go crooked - which cats or dogs don't have. Woody was built to show this "lean." All horses, without exception, are to some degree either "left-leaning" or "right-leaning." Most horses seem to prefer to lean to the right. This creates a prominent (apparently over-muscled) right shoulder, a larger right forefoot, a tendency for the horse to carry its head (and haunches) to the left, and greater ease in following paths that curve left.

Eye dominance manifests itself as strongly as it does in horses partly because of the way they focus their eyes. The human eye has muscles which act to "squash" the lens and the whole eyeball, lengthening the distance from the lens at the front of the eyeball to the retina, or image-receiving screen, at the back. Shifting from far to near focus in humans means activating the "squashing" muscles.

Horses that lean to the right may lead with the right eye, or may try to square the head and both eyes to the direction of travel. A horse that leans to the right, however, will very rarely lead with the left eye, and will object strongly (due to pains in his neck) if the rider forces him to do so. Eye-dominance can be lessened and the degree of straightness in the horse increased both directly, by working to call the attention of the non-dominant eye, and indirectly, by addressing the horse's pattern of leaning.

PATTERNS OF COMPENSATION

Woody demonstrates only the simplest pattern of physical compensation for eye-dominance. This pattern is not common in the lighter breeds of horse, manifesting only when an animal of phlegmatic temperament doesn't mind approaching things with one eye leading and the other trailing, always out of focus and always deficient in "life." this pattern results in the grossest asymmetries in foot and shoulder development, the grossest lugging on one side of the bit, and a strong tendency to drift or even crab or stagger obliquely sideways. At the opposite extreme lies so-called "rein lameness": slight but chronic asymmetry in movement. This results from the interaction of the horse's leaning with hands which are trying to "fix" an asymmetrical feel by continuously pulling (holding) the animal's head "straight." No horse can be straightened by manipulation of either the head or of the feet.

This merely serves to point up the danger in taking one dressage adage literally - that the horse must go "calm, forward, straight." This order cannot and must not be followed. Though many have tried, no one has ever made a horse straight by driving it forward. The task of "making" a horse straight is like trying to drive a trackless train forward from the rear. If the train's cars are initially out of alignment, no amount of pushing it forward will ever remove the kinks! Before it can move straight - that is, efficiently - the cars first have to be properly aligned; and to be able to be aligned, they have to be separately moveable (the joints between them have to be supple). The proper order of training therefore is: calm, supple, straight, strong, forward (impulsive).

HOW TO TEACH A CROOKED HORSE TO CARRY HIMSELF STRAIGHT

I am now going to convey to you one of the most basic "secrets" of horse training, one which, however, very few people have ever clearly understood. You will probably not understand it either, not even from playing with Woody. Most peoples' best shot at grasping this is to imitate a horse and get down on all fours and crawl. Since you have collarbones, here's an operating rule so that your imitation of the horse will be as good as possible: when you lean, keep your shoulders parallel to the floor. Don't dip down on one side; keep your back flat and the line of your shoulders horizontal.

There are two techniques. This is the elementary one: obviously, if the horse is inclined to lean to the right, if he runs into something uncomfortable when he gets there - such as a light tap with the bight of the reins or the rider's boot tapping him at the girth - he will immediately move back toward center. This method is direct: the lean is felt and manifested through the shoulders; it is to the shoulder area that aids are directed. The advantage of this method is that it is easy for almost any rider to do effectively. Riders can use it to improve their "feel" for crookedness. The disadvantages are that doing very much of it is liable to irritate the animal, and also that even after "correction" the horse will always, within a few strides, drift back into his old pattern. This maneuver is therefore merely a class exercise. It doesn't cure, because despite the horse's peculiar shoulder anatomy and concomitant tendency to lean through the shoulders, the cause of the problem does not reside anywhere in the forequarter. Leaning is caused by asymmetrical use of the hindquarters!

The method that addresses the hindquarters is called "the master's way," and it does cure. Proceed as follows:

If the horse is leaning to the right, find the time in the stride when the horse's right hind foot is all the way back - the instant before it's going to be picked up. Just as the foot begins to swing forward, stimulate it to change its flight path from where it would have landed (to the right of the ribcage) to a point directly under the animal's navel. The total differential in position will not likely be more than six inches; usually it's more like two or three. Light aids are all that are required, although timing them correctly is essential.

When the horse's right foot lands under the navel and begins to bear weight, it will cause the animal to have to re-arrange its whole body and its whole balance around that leg. This is what the eighteenth-century master of haute ècole, Robichon de LaGuérinière, termed "engagement of the hindquarters." It is a movement small and lateral, not one that emphasizes (as the modern school does) the back-to-front motion.

Once again, in order to clearly understand the master's way, you'll have to get down on all fours. Without attempting to do anything "unnatural" with either of your legs, crawl forward while leaning right. Notice how you tend to drift to the right. Now, still leaning right, crawl forward while, each time it swings forward, you place your right knee under your navel. What happens through your shoulders? In the "master's way," the hindquarters are used to correct the forequarters, thus eliminating the "lean" and all of its side-effects throughout the body.

Anyone who thinks that addressing the physique is enough has missed 90% of the lesson that the horse is attempting to give.

This article was written in order to clarify what the physical body does in the standing and moving horse. In order to be a good rider, trainer, horse owner, veterinarian, animal chiropractor, farrier, or other "horse professional", you need to understand the Woody Biomechanical Paradigm. But the more important story—and far the deeper therapeutic approach – is to learn to perceive and work with what is going on inside the animal. For this, I suggest you review "The Birdie Book" or at least the summary of Birdie Theory posted in the Knowledge Base section of this Website.

For more information concerning the links between straightness and its physical "child", collection, please see "True Collection" also in this section of the Equine Studies Institute website.

Thank you for your attention.