Toplines can be deceiving!
Jan 06 2012
Emily did a hilarious review of her pony Lemony a couple days ago. One of her major criticisms of the little jumper was how “downhill” she is – and the point of her croup is most definitely higher than her withers! A few posters thought that she looked fairly balanced regardless; one even suggested that perhaps it was how the photo was set up that was making her look that way. (We think we’ll take Emily’s word on it!) But it does bring up an interesting point and a common misconception.
So we’re going to borrow Lemony again for this post! While the relation of wither to croup seems like a simple way to determine levelness, it’s far from accurate. Take the two pictures below. One is Lemony, the other is a Thoroughbred gelding.
At first glance the TB appears to be far more uphill than Lemony – his wither is clearly higher than his croup. But we’re going deeper than that today! Here’s a closer look, first at the gelding:
We’ll start off with the obvious – he has a wither that resembles a combination of a camel hump and a shark fin. Woe be the rider who attempts to ride bareback on this fellow! That wither skews things somewhat; combine that with quite a level hip (the red line) and you’re left with a horse that is functionally slightly downhill.
How you can tell – the yellow dots mark corresponding points on the horse’s forehand and hind end. Hind cannons are typically a little longer than fronts, so the fact that his hocks are slightly higher than his knees isn’t concerning. What is concerning is that that trend continues further up. His stifle is also higher than his elbow (blue line) and, as the green line shows, his hip joint (where the femur rests in the hips) is marginally higher than the structural base of his neck (the C6 vertabrae). This means his weight will tend to be carried on the forehand and he’ll have a harder time bringing his hind end underneath him. Now, with proper riding and conditioning he could likely be trained to lift the base of his neck sufficiently to carry himself around level or possibly even slightly uphill, but that’s certainly not what he’s doing in this photo!
So let’s take a closer look at Lemony, shall we?
She has the opposite conformation – almost non-existent withers and quite a sloped butt. (That’s the technical term, right?) If you look at the relevant points on her body you’ll see her hocks are also slightly higher than her knees. Her stifles, as well, are higher than her elbows, but to a lesser degree than the chestnut’s. And the final test, base of neck to hip joint? Almost perfectly level! In fact, if we were to believe the poster who thinks this photo has her standing slightly downhill, she could possibly be functionally uphill.
So, as far as how these two will actually move, the bum-high pony is the one who’ll have an easier time rocking her weight back to her hind end and carrying herself in a balanced manner. Strange, huh?
71 comments to “Toplines can be deceiving!”
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Do you know what that tb’s registered name is? He looks A LOT like a horse I had a few years back, identical in fact.
Ok well the horse I think he is is Moonlight Ruler
Then it’s not him. Be interesting if they were related though!
Actually, I’m of the opinion that the majority of race-bred TBs these days are a little bit downhill. I’ve learned to read downhillness (it’s a word now) properly.
The most downhill horse in our barn is a TB cross former show hunter, and man is that thing downhill! I don’t even like riding him much because it’s so hard to get the bugger OFF his forehand..and he abuses being on his forehand to lean on you and dive forward.
And man, that TB you feature has a shark fin. I wouldn’t want to be the person fitting a saddle to that.
Thank you so much for this post!! This is the kind of post that first brought me to the site, and I’m so glad to see they are back!
Less focus on all the negative stuff in the world (of which there is just so much) and more education
THAAAAAAAAANK YOOOOOOOU!!!!!! for putting the little dots and lines on the photos. That is so incredibly helpful/instructive.
Ok, this is kinda random, but is anyone else getting an invisible white box that is blocking out some of the text & pictures of the posts?
Yes, it’s annoying. I thought it was just me.
Yep. It hasn’t happened to me in a while though!
Just highlight the text and copy it into word so that you can read it. P.I.T.A, but it works.
http://www.operationhorserescue.blogspot.com
So, who’s going to create the App that automatically draws the lines when you point your smart phone at the horse.? Come on, I know there’s techies out there!
A pic is worth a thousand words and the lines are worth a million.
Loved this post. I’m absolutely terrible at judging conformation and can only see a fault if it’s glaringly obvious or someone points it out for me. One of the biggest grievances I had with Fuglyblog as a whole was a picture being posted and the horse’s conformation being ripped apart, but never explaining the why, the where or the how that fault affects the horse. It’s not to say I’m a total noob when it comes conformation, and I know it does affect the horses movement and can stare at a trainwreck and say ‘that right there is a fugly’. But lets face it, a lot of readers, myself included, don’t really have the full idea of what’s going when conformation is discussed, and the reason everyone loves having things circled,underlined and painted all over is because they finally start to understand where and what the hell everyone else is talking about.
We bitch about breeding poor quality horses, but we don’t go around teaching about proper conformation to the next generation of riders and breeders. If I ever see a book full of diagrams in a tackshop or bookstore that colorfully points out faults and positive traits like what was in todays post, I’d buy it in heartbeat and spread the love around the local 4-H, PonyClub and lesson barns.
Actually, Pony Club DOES teach that
Realizing your horses true potential. It has A LOT of diagrams, lines, dots ect that show the muscle, tendons, bonse structure ect. It can be a little overwhelming though – I read the conformation section and I didn’t really absorb that much, I can tell I will have to study it for a while to take it all in.
http://www.operationhorserescue.blogspot.com
No horse has an uphill underline. Try measuring some of the greatest sporthorses – some of them may come close to even, but many are downhill from stifle to elbow. That’s just how horses are. Wish I could remember where I read the article that pointed this out :/
I agree with you zebra about the underline.
Let’s look at Moorlands Totilas… Mr. Current Dressage-world King! His underline looks downhill also.
http://www.superiorequinesires.com/stallions/moorlandstotilas2.jpg
The hip thing, however, I agree with. The TB’s hip, like Qweenie said, the hip/croup and his back being so sort bother me more.
And looking at the TB again I don’t even really mind the short back. Mostly the flat croup.
Ditto. My old dressage instructor’s Hanoverian had a very flat croup, like this: http://static.equine.com/listing_images/7/7/3/773855_363344_HD.jpg
When I mentioned it she said that the angle of the hip made up for it. I will concede that a horse with a better hip angle will do better than one lacking in both areas, but I prefer a steeper croup. I never liked the way her horse went anyway
Wow, yeah that croup sorta shoots those back legs out behind him, doesn’t it? More hunter type body than a dressage-y body.
I had a hard time finding pictures of Totilas even just standing. Then it occurred to me to try for the studbook shot XD… I did find one square halt series from a photographer but they were taken a bit right of center profile so it kinda skewed things a little.
LOL, I actually drew the lines on the same pic but didn’t feel like uploading it. Wish I could find one of him standing square.
WOOOHOOOO!!! I learned something today!! Love this post! Keep them coming!
Look at my Lemons being used to educate folk! Fabulous! Also that’s actually very true to how she rides. She’s a bizarre case that way. I saw the comments about how maybe it was just the angle of the picture, or one person suggested it’s because she’s so mutton withered. She is, I assure you, quite downhill. Which is why her rump so comfortable to lie on.
Anyway.
She is INCREDIBLY well balanced under saddle, naturally, I’ve never had to work hard or much at all to balance her. What’s even more bizarre is she does not have a flying lead change (unless she damn well feels like it, we’ve tried EVERY trick in the book, 4 different trainers have tried, I no longer let anyone bother, she’s 18, time to let it go). This is more likely due to we think someone beat the tar out of her trying to get it before we ever owned her because asking her for them makes her MAD, mad enough to ruin your rides for a week (grabbing the bit and stiff arming you basically) which is bizarre because she is so pleasant and placid otherwise. But for how balanced she rides it’s strange she won’t do them. But I would say that calling her functionally uphill is probably true, she rides extremely balanced on her own.
In fact I’ll include a youtube video from a teeny tiny jumper class we did in the Fall of 2010.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HS7aEs-7CKM
I don’t have to do much for those turns other than steer and poke a rib out with an outside spur.
A 1″ spur with a rowel on it. Yep.
Looks to me like she handles the lead changes on her own. What a good girl!
Also, if y’all are gonna be on my youtube, you should watch the video of her spooking at the tire jump. Tires were our nemesis briefly. Until we jumped them and got over it. But it’s pretty amusing she damn near took off with me in the process of filming that. Which I think was more because she knew I was one handed and not totally paying attention more so than anything else. Ponies…they know…
I knew I saw her crossfiring, it was this video of Lemony. (Emily, hope you don’t mind me posting this!) Lemony changes over the jumps beautifully but when she comes down on the wrong lead for the next turn she only changes in front and in some cases prefers to correct herself by changing to the “counter” lead which is easier for her than only changing behind. I would expect her long back combined with her tipped back pelvis contribute to lead changes being challenging for her. When she changes over the jump, her hips are already up so the change comes more easily.
When I ride, I use the SI joint as a “pivot” and teach hip control (I’m a fanatic!) while 2-tracking. I want the hip to lead, shoulders to follow, and rib cage to be to the outside of the direction of travel. I find this exercise strengthens and stretches the loins and that the right side typically can’t bend at first. This is an area on a horse that I want to be flexible. I wonder if Lemony would benefit from this exercise in helping her get her changes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=xgo_88arKQM
My gelding is about as automatic with the lead change as automatic can be. He will do them for everybody, anytime anywhere (and in the process spoiled me terribly!). That said, as I’ve ridden more horses, I’ve started to think that the flying change is overrated. It is such an easy thing to ruin a good horse over and really, outside of the 3rd Level tests, when do you really need it? I mean *really* need it? Not really in the Hunters, because you can teach horse and rider to change in the air. I’ve won a lot of classes that way, and got my ass kicked that way, too! It might be one of the Eq tests, but it’s been at least 15 years since I’ve even watched one of those divisions, so I’m not sure. A lot of jumping horses (and their riders) would be so much better off forgetting about the stupid lead change and learning to maintain balance on whatever lead and focus on the obstacle instead! The proof is in that little Lemony Pudding right there.
This is quite the interesting post! Like Jennifer R, I have heard that race-bred TBs tend toward the downhill. I find TBs to be similar to Quarter Horses in that there is a HUGE array of interesting conformation to be found within each breed. I’m sure other breeds display this too, but these are the two that first come to my mind. At least that chestnut gelding has a super cute face! I want to hug his adorable self.
http://www.itsbraintime.blogspot.com
I copied both photos with the dots into my image program (Presentations Perfect), flipped the TB ti face left, and lined both horses up with the grid. Strangely enough, the body lines on both horses were so close as to be identical!.
The biggest difference was in the knee/hock line — Lemony was much more downhill there.
Background fence-lines in both photos are at an angle and that can fool the eye. Regardless, I bet Lemony is a very comfortable ride, the TB will take some work. I’m more concerned about his very short back and flat hip.
My horse is all withers and shoulders, and I FEEL for the people who have to fit that TB for a saddle. I had a nice old Blue Ribbon AP saddle that literally fit EVERY SINGLE HORSE I ever put it on, from Arabs to TBs to QHs, but not my guy. As we rode, he’d get more and more agitated, then eventually turn around and nip my toe.
So I found an old County Continental dressage saddle, with a big ol’ tree, and he really likes it. So do I – my leg feels like a supermodel’s, and I can’t do anything but sit up nice and open.
Except I have to be careful that it doesn’t end up on his kidneys!! Breastplates look weird on dressage saddles, but sometimes you do what you gotta do.
This is super informative. THANK YOU!!!!!!
I have one of those! It’s a 1970 Passier AP, and it fits shark-fin TBs the best – medium-wide tree with a great cutback at the pommel. It fits narrower or wider horses by just sitting higher or lower without pinching. The only horse it hasn’t worked on was a TWH with damn near vertical shoulders. She has to wear a saddle that’s further back.
Great post, and it explains something I”ve felt many times (downhill-but-balanced v’s uphill-but-on-the-forehand), but not been able to explain properly. Can you give some guidance on spotting the location of the C6 neck vertebrae and the hip joint, particularly on a well fleshed individual?
Thanks,
Claire Vale
Kahurangi Equine Rescue
New Zealand
Kahurangi – the lowest palpable vertebra on the neck is felt by standing in front of the horse’s shoulder, placing your hands on either side of the neck and pressing with the heels of your hands. You will feel the vertebra as very solid, as opposed to softer muscle tissue. The lumbro-sacral joint cannot be felt, even on a skinny horse! To estimate where that joint is, imagine placing your index finger straight down into the horse from the top of the croup. At the tip of your finger is the joint (or a close approximation to it). The line is drawn from these two points. (I believe the lines on the two horses above do not go far enough forward to show the lowest palpable vertebra.)
Go to Deb Bennett’s website to learn everything about horses. Yes, Snark/Snug, IMHO everything anyone needs to know about horses is there.
I really like that technique of using the lines to discern whether a horse is truly downhill or not! This helps me understand why I always have been drawn to horses that have their neck set “higher” out of their wither and shoulder. Makes sense! Thanks for the new tool to put in my conformation assessment tool belt! I love getting this kind of information, because, though I have a really good eye for conformation and can usually pick out nicely conformed horses, having techniques that help refine the evaluation of a horse are wonderful! Thanks for the 411 and thanks for taking over the Fuglyblog! I am really enjoying reading your work!
I think we should have a conformation class like this more often! Maybe discuss breed standards for conformation, too? I would love to get a more critical eye for my mare to see what I’m overlooking (I call it “love goggles”).
I just wanted to say rock on! Loved this post I learned something new and am now in the process of taking photos of all my 11 horses and totally breaking apart there structure using the lines to confirm my suspicions of conformation flaws in each of them!
Anymore cheats and hints that you can give us would be greatly appreciated!!!!
I love the conformational posts. Always learn SO much from them!
I’m going to jump in here about another deniminator – attachment. When I compare the gelding to Lemony, I see where the stifle / elbow does factor into the level comparison. But don’t you find her loin attachment on the weak side? Even Emily stated that several trainers were unable to teach Lemony to do lead changes. I would see where weak loins and her long back would make it difficult for her to lift her hips to perform a change. I watched her video and she is a balanced pony but she doesn’t move deep under herself, she’s more flat and cadenced than lifted and round. I read something in the recent conformation post that someone attached showing how different types of conformation are more suited to specific disciplines. Dressage horses with flatter croups (flatter SI to point of rump) are more suited to high collection than more typical horses with a more perfect hip triangle. It’s just easier for them to get their legs up and under themselves. Totilas is a perfect example.
I would expect the gelding to be a bit heavy in front but I’d say his long, low neck and front legs slightly under him would contribute to this. I’d also see him reaching deeper from behind than Lemony. Is there a video available of this horse for comparison? I could be way off with my theory on him but am curious.
You’re exactly right, Lemony does not reach under herself from behind well at all. Getting a good trot out of her is difficult. She finds it much easier to just canter than trot under herself with her back end. As well as in lead changes, it’s her back she won’t swap. She swaps the front fine on command but she’ll just cross canter all day long. She will obviously swap over a jump though. But not a pole. She has zero respect for poles actually…
This is also partly because she’s such a tubby tubberson, I believe.
Hard to reach up when that belly’s in the way!
I usually call her chubbzilla, because she will knock you or anything in between her and food over.
I don’t think Lemony is standing downhill in the picture – I think the camera is on a slight lean and that her front end may be slightly closer to the camera than her rump (coz her hind feet are sitting higher than her front feet). You can actually fix slanted photos on piknic.com – makes it MUCH easier to do a conformation critique.
The withers on that TB remind me of my mare a little. On the up side, she’s easy to fit an aussie saddle to (and here in aus, that’s the main variety of ‘western’ type saddles) – I’ve always found horses with mutton withers were far more difficult to fit a saddle to than horses with high withers.
It’s nice that you drew the lines and dots, I’ve been reading a book lately that has a lot of conformation information in there, but they don’t explain things that clearly.
http://www.operationhorserescue.blogspot.com
Ummm. My mistake, that photo of Lemony isn’t on a lean.
*pours coffee*
http://www.operationhorserescue.blogspot.com
Thank you for this post! It’s sometimes hard for me to spot the conformational flaws…and your dots and lines made it so much easier to see what we were all talking about. I’m looking forward to more posts like this in the future–I like the snark as much as the next person, but I like learning even better.
Ooooh yay! Lines and explanations instead of the shredding of horses whose conformation may not be stellar, but are still functional, well loved and taken care of!
I learned more about downhillness (yeah, totally a word) today than I ever did in my 4 years of horse judging in middle and high school.
Thanks!
I have an uncanny feeling I have ridden that chestnut gelding… seems to me he has a big powerful head and endless curiosity. Makes for an interesting ride for the less confident rider!
So my question is how do you know where the C6 vertebrae is in a photograph or even when you are looking in person?
I love the dots and description, really wonderful that you help others learn the WHY behind a critique
Is there a website/book where you learned how/where to correctly place the dots and lines in the example photos? It’s something I’d really like to learn how to do (and I’m sure I’m not the only one!)
Geez, this stuff is helpful! If I got a good side view of my horse, Prince, do you think you guys could do a conformation critique of him? He’s a Morgan/Paint cross with nothing particular to recommend him to the world, except that I love him dearly!
Peharps some body work would help Lemony with her leads *and* her trotting. My own little mare *was* doing better lead changes than my riding deserves – she seemed quite pleased with herself when she figured it out, and wanted to practice them. Then all of a sudden she quit doing them. AND.. her trot got rough, reluctant, and wonky going in clockwise circles. She’d break to a canter unless very warmed-up, then be unhappy in her canter on that lead.
Bodywork person came out, did adjustments in both horse’s necks (which mirror my own horrible neck) and LO, behold… my mare’s sacrum was out of whack. The therapist said “With her misalignment, you would have been seeing difficulty with her right-lead canter, difficulty turning and bending to the right and doing any lateral work involving that bend…. and getting under herself to the right. BINGO.
Now she’s much, much better! Perhaps a good bodywork professional could work with Lemony and help her with what appear to be ‘aging’ issues…
Wondering if Snuggly and Snarkly or Fugly and Mugly or even Sparkly would be willing to draw lines and pick my little ‘white’ mare to pieces for me? Just so I know what she should be able to do most easily if I can get out of her way…
Absolutely – send us some pics: fuglyblog@hotmail.com
She’s had bodywork done in the past and it’s done nothing for the lead changes. We honestly believe as much as she may be limited in obtaining them by her conformation, that it’s mental with her. We really believe someone beat the crap out of her trying to get them in the past. If you want to make that pony MAD, ask for a flying change. Why bother pushing the issue if all it does is piss her off, and she does her job fine without it? We’re just never capable of being competitive in hunters or equitation, which doesn’t matter to me. She would never be competitive in hunters anyway, what with her ridiculous knee action.
I used to ride a school horse who would not ever do a flying lead change. He would just automatically do a simple change. They tried everything they could think of and eventually just accepted the fact that he would do anything in the world for you…except a flying lead change. This was about 20+ years ago and I don’t think he’s around anymore.
It’s nice to read that people are enjoying the informative posts more than the negative and the snark. That’s a positive thing.
One thing to keep in mind when a horse’s spine is built downhill is the fact that the agility required to be fast and quick goes with that particular conformation trait. Without speed, there isn’t a high level of athleticism. Being downhill, especially in the QH and TB, is not a bad thing unless it deviates to the extreme. The further a conformational trait strays from ideal, the more limited the horse is in its ability to be a versatile athlete, or to remain sound.
I know people tend to feel Fugly tore apart people’s horses unfairly, but very few of them were like Lemony.. loved pets who are not being bred, bred, bred.
She skewered people because their knock-kneed, cow-hocked, hammer-headed lovelies were being touted as amazing studs producing 200 ugly foals every year or ‘bred every single year till they fall over’ broodmares, and in my book, that’s very well earned skewering. There’s nothing wrong with having a fugly beloved pet like my husband’s ridiculous legged Appaloosa gelding (The key word in this sentence is gelding, by the way). There’s something wrong in having a horse with silly conformation and breeding it repeatedly (or at all), thinking you’re going to somehow create the next Totilas.
Thank you, ladies, for putting the lines on there. I can look at a horse sometimes and know I don’t like something about them, but at times I can’t tell people WHY I don’t like it except to say that something looks off to my obsessive, OCD gaze.
I think it’s also helpful to continue letting people contribute their own horses to critique.. in dogs we call love goggles being kennel blind.
I assume there’s a similar horsey term for having trouble seeing the flaws in our much loved equine buddies. Barn blindness?
I respectfully disagree with you just a little, Frost. Fugly may have started out skewering people for breeding their conformational crap but towards the end of her ownership of the blog, the posts read more like a fire-breathing fantaic that everything even remotely un-perfect needed to be euthanized because it was worthless and no one would ever want it. The post about the jackass in North Dakota with his 700+ head of range-bred QH’s comes to mind. That post and the comments that followed were pretty terrible. Instead of condemning the fact that no one had ever done anything with the horses to make them useful equine citizens, the post read like she was condemning the horses for existing because *she* didn’t like their breeding. Never mind that a lot of people find their Hancock breeding useful and completely ignoring the fact that just because a horse has a nest and a hammer head doesn’t mean that they are completely hopeless and not even worth trying to get broke. That’s the tone of the Fugly I remember the most and if you don’t think she wouldn’t have ripped Lemony apart for being “nesty”, whatever the hell that has to do with anything, beloved useful pet, or not, then we might have been reading two different blogs.
I feel the same as you pretty much. In fact I remember in my early days of finding this blog, one of her posts was skewering gypsy vanner’s and I emailed her pictures of Lemony, both conformation and jumping, just to say “they aren’t all bad” and never heard anything from her. Which could certainly have been because she was backlogged with emails just as much as it could have been because her mind was made up about the breed being a bunch of hairy spotted useless things.
I don’t think there was ever a time when her email inbox -wasn’t- overflowing, so it’s likely it did just get lost in the shuffle, but even if not.. I probably also wouldn’t have felt it was necessary to make a post solely to say “Some Gypsies aren’t awful or even half-bad.” That seems obvious to me.
You can say that categorically about almost anything and have it be proven true.. I don’t know that it’s worth a separate post or even an acknowledgement. Lemony is cute, imo, not conformationally perfect, but good luck finding any horse that actually is conformationally perfect although some are of course a whole lot closer than others. You don’t breed her even though she’s a sooper speshul Gypsy faerie dream horse, so it has zero impact upon what’s going on the market, which for me makes her perfectly fine to do exactly what she does: Be a nice pet horse who is a really cute jumper.
Most Gypsy breeders in the US deserve the mockery they get. *shrug* I have no pain in saying that, and I’d have no pain in contributing to the pistol-whipping either. They’re ridiculous, and so are the people paying 20k for one of them. They’re cute. If I lived in Europe, I might even pick one up for my kid…. cause they’re cheap there for a reason, which is the main reason I support mocking the people hawking them here.
That market is what it is.. a fool’s paradise. (Note that I am not in any way calling you a fool, Emily. But I’ve seen some serious crazy from the Gypsy fans, and the breeders remind me of -doodle breeders, which is my personal soapbox as a dog person. 
I won’t get started on that.)
@Zebu – I never said she didn’t have her personal rants and raves and subjects that you were unlikely to get a lot of sense out of her on, because she did. This was also her blog, and I always had the option to not read a post if I thought it was not a useful one, which I exercised. That the direction of the blog got more militant towards the end isn’t really worth arguing. But if it had been me, I probably would have slipped off that deep end a whole lot faster, posting about the awful things people do on a daily basis to animals and each other. I’m personally not interested in judging her for her shortcomings, as I have plenty of my own. I enjoyed the blog right up to her final post, and was incredibly sorry to see her go. I didn’t mind Mugwump, but I think she made the right decision both for herself and for the blog. I like Snugly and Snarkly from their other blog and I think they will bring a fresh take to this blog that is healthy for it.
But that doesn’t change or alter the fact that like her opinions or not, Fugly was willing to put herself and her opinions out there, and speak about things that need to be spoken about, and I still stand by my point that she tended to pick on horrific and prolific breeders of crap, even if the crap was just crap because there were 300 of them foaled and they were unhandled and wild as tinkers, but not really that ugly. If you disagreed with her disliking Hancock, that’s fine. There was never a lack of argument here. I don’t like Quarter Horses period. Arguing with me would be as useless as trying to tell Fugly that Hancock-bred horses are the next coming of Christ, but anyone is welcome to do it if they’d like.
At the end of the day, opinions are like… well. You know the rest, and if you didn’t want to read hers, all you had to do was click over to TBfriends and carry on with your day. That’s what I did when the topic didn’t interest me. It’s the benefit of not having the responsibility of writing this thing.
Oh man, those hardcore gypsy fans are whackadoodles. I think the breed is fun, but people in the states are incredibly stupid. It’s why I said before that if you want a gypsy, you can get one that’s already broke to ride from overseas and being used as a lesson pony, trail pony, cross country pony, husband’s horse, etc for super cheap. And they say it’s a gypsy in the sale ad, I’ve even looked online. You can find that for like 2 – 4k easily. But an unbroke 3 year old in the states is never less than 10k. It’s insane.
This was a great post! It really got me thinking about my own horse and I tried this out for myself and posted to my blog, here: http://ahorsenamedmilo.blogspot.com/2012/01/conformation-critique-on-milo.html
A URL to the photo: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1XtxPOkj99g/Twfc-9sNf_I/AAAAAAAABrM/m12C9q0Zp4o/s640/miloconfo.png
What I relatively came to conclude was that although he appears downhill on the topline, and functionally travels downhill from stifle to elbow, from femur to base of neck he actually moves functionally uphill. Average out those two opposite directions, and he should relatively move neutral or level. Thoughts on this?
Almost all horses are at least slightly downhill from stifle to elbow. What’s problematic is if they are majorly downhill at that point. Sorry, should have made that a little clearer!
Does anyone know a good place to post pictures to get your horse’s conformation critiqued? All of the forums that I have found online that are specifically dedicated to this topic are from 2009 or earlier. It could also be a good place to learn HOW to critique (taken with a grain of salt, as you can’t always trust people on this interwebs business), practice critiquing, get feedback, etc.
Hi! Given the positive response we received for this post, we’ve created a group on Facebook for people to post their horses and seek conformation critiques from other members. It’s called Confo Confab (I’m a sucker for alliteration) – check it out at http://www.facebook.com/groups/139465519502630/ (hopefully that’s the right link!)
Now I have to go and join that too.
Agree with KSCNB. I am terrible at figuring out conformation. I try to rate the three horses in Horse & Rider every month, but I stink at conformation….I am usually so wrong. I would LOVE to see a post similar to this one about shoulders. For the life of me, I cannot figure out good, bad, sloped, straight, etc. shoulders or how they pertain to a smooth/good gait. I would love to get this set in my mind once and for all. This post was VERY helpful on all the points noted. Thanks!
That’s coming up soon!
I can assure you Lemony was level when that picture was taken, I am holding her!
She truly is a delightful mare and had she and Emily have been a delightful addition to our barn family!. Everyone loves Lemony!
Hi everyone! Just wanted to let y’all know we started a facebook group called “Confo Confab” for people to post their horses and have other members of the group critique them
Please stop by and check it out at http://www.facebook.com/groups/139465519502630/
Hi gang! Check out Craiglist Inland Empire for Tanewbian $3000 Perris. Pity the poor horse.
I’ve enjoyed the last couple of posts. Functional conformation is an interest of mine, probably because I’ve dabbled in so many different disciplines over the years.
I hope that this blog or the facebook page will continue to look at conformation periodically in terms of why the subject horse moves/performs the way it does.
I used to follow the Judge My Ride critiques, but unfortunately the vague specifics provided by the professionals always left me with more questions than answers. I always wanted a detailed explanation of what a shoulder with “good slope” means and why it is important. I always wondered if the sheer number of submissions kept the answers brief.
I would also love to see critiques of horses which excel at different disciplines. In other words, compare the top show jumper to the top dressage performer to the top western pleasure horse to the top cutter. Take a look at what makes their conformation different, but suitable for their disciplines.
I think too many horsepeople become compartmetalized in their discipline of choice. As a result, they fail to see the functional conformation of a horse that performs in a different discipline and tend toward mockery, disgust, or just plain incorrect critique.
I am the absolute worst at conformation – I always fail at critiques – so I thank you profusely for drawing the lines and dots on these two. You have no idea how much that helped me!