Are You Creating A Sway-backed Horse?
We are going to take a break this month from our riding lessons. A much more important situation keeps presenting itself to me… sway-backed horses. Many of you may think, as I did for years, that becoming sway-backed with age was a “natural” part of a horse growing older. Years of experience with horses, and because most of them have been older riding lesson horses, has taught me otherwise.
To start with, if you do not think that having a sway-back causes a chronic pain in a horse, just make a quick visit to a chiropractor and get his opinion of what a sway back does to a human, and we aren’t carrying an extra load of up to 25% of our weight! Having a sway-back in humans (which is often a result of carrying excessive weight in the stomach, as it can be in horses) is one of the biggest causes of chronic, crippling lower back pain. The only difference is that we can go to the chiropractor, and take pain medications when we need them, and refrain from workloads, which reduce somewhat the pain. Our horse cannot do this, he just suffers, and often in silence.
So why are horses sway-backed? As with any abnormal condition, there are often many causes, at once. But there are 4 main causes that humans can prevent:
1) Poor riding habits.
2) Painful and bad fitting saddles.
3) Riding bareback.
4) Too much weight for the size of the horse. Many times horseback riders are causes of all four problems at different times.
Poor Riding habits: Any time a rider is sitting with the majority of their weight dumped in the back of the saddle, they are putting abnormal pressure on the lower part of the horses back. Putting your legs and feet out in front of you as you ride often does this. This is often seen in trail riders who have never seen themselves ride, or do not know about balanced riding. This situation can be made much worse by using saddles with very small skirts or in English saddles, no skirts, because the back of the saddle (under the cantle area) digs into the horse’s back. Pain causes the horse to dip its spine in an effort to get away from the cause of pain. Repeated riding in this manner will cause the spine to become swayed, sometimes severely.
Bad fitting saddles: A saddle that does not fit the horse, and does not spread the rider’s weight evenly over the majority of the horse’s back will create constant pain. Western saddles are designed to do this, but they cannot have any areas that carry more pressure than others. English, Australian, treeless, synthetic or any variations of these that do not have a reasonably large, leather (or neoprene) skirt area logically cannot distribute the riders weight over a large part of the horse’s back. Most of these saddles are not made for long hours in the saddle. The heavier the rider, the larger the skirt area should be. A well fitting saddle, with a large skirt area, even if it weighs more, will be more comfortable to the horse than any light weight, smaller area saddle. Just as the saddle needs to fit you, it is more important that it fit the horse perfectly!
This subject will be continued next month. Please join me.
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