The Cruelest Excuse

Probably the cruelest excuse you can make about your horse is to say this about his slightly poor or quirky behavior...his slightly abnormal reaction...his somewhat odd reflex: 

"It's just the way he is. He's always like that." 

Why is is cruel? 99% of the time he's trying to tell you something isn't quite right. He's a little bit stoic (or maybe a LOT stoic). It's easy to write it off. After all he's not hurting you or his grooms and it's not THAT aggravating...you can put up with it because he does his job well. He wins ribbons, good ones.

If he's not stoic, you have already called the vet and had it checked out because he told you loud and clear that he's in discomfort.

It's not the 3 legged lame horses I worry about. They get the attention. It's the ones who win ribbons, give lessons, cause no trouble that no one bothers to get checked out that I worry about. The good horses.

He may not even know he can.

SPEED is a function of DISTANCE over TIME.

The triangle of Speed, Distance and Time. 
For determining Speed, we're interested in the bottom triangle.


If you go 50 miles (Distance) in 5 hours (Time), your Speed was 10 miles per hour
10 mph = 50 miles divided by 5 hours or 10 mph = 50 miles/5 hours

An equine taking 20 quick short steps may not be as fast as one who takes 15 long steps to cover the same distance although he may look faster because his legs are moving quicker.  Visualize a VSE vs a horse trotting a cross country obstacle course.

Do the 20 quick steps take more or less time to accomplish the same Distance than the 15 long ones?

Which equine will expend more energy or tire faster?

Which is more efficient?

Slowing the tempo of a gait, that is: allowing the horse to take longer, more efficient strides, generally allows a horse to move its body and limbs through a fuller range of motion.

To accomplish this, the muscles need to be supple, not tense.

Encourage your horse to slow his tempo but...now here is the important part....

He may not even know that he can.
Be patient, be kind, allow him the space and time to learn.

Seeing the World: Humans, Horses and Birds

Equine Vision

What a horse sees are in images C and D. Nte that fluorescent orange is seen as almost the same color as the grass. When a carriage horse is flying through a course made of traffic cones, the cones and the grass there are set on are almost the same color. Now check out the vision of birds below!

Real life implications of dichromatic color vision for the horse. Two unaltered digital images (A,B) and digitally altered (C,D) forms of the same pictures simulate the dichromatic color vision of the horse. A computer algorithm was used to simulate how each color in the original picture would appear to a dichromatic horse possessing visual pigments with the spectra determined in this study. To more closely approximate the horse’s visual experience, the images were also adjusted to take into account the decreased spatial acuity of the horse.

Bird Vision

Birds are tetrachromats, they see four colors: UV, blue, green and red, whereas humans are trichromats and can only see three colors: blue, green, red. Hence the differences in vision below. Bear in mind, that the magenta UV ‘color’ shown here has been chosen to make it visible for us humans, it is a ‘false color’, as per definition UV light has no color.

https://www.earthlymission.com/human-vision-vs-bird-vision/