Thoroughbred mare: pleasure horse!

Jun 14, 2010 11:09

Owner: morgieporgie (thanks for the pictures!)
Breed: Thoroughbred mare
Age: 11
Job: Pleasure/trails, low level dressage, some jumping…

From Conformation Critique

From Conformation Critique


I picked this photo because she was standing better in relation to the camera...

From Conformation Critique
This horse was off the track but never raced, and has only recently been back in work.

First you can see that this mare is well-balanced with all three “sections” of her body being roughly equal (light blue lines). Her back is a good medium length and her withers appear to be well-sprung without being overly prominent.

This mare’s shoulder is decent in both slope and length - both falling into the range that will give her a good strode length and free shoulder but not “ideal” since her shoulder blade could be longer (see green lines). A slope of around 55 degrees for a shoulder is still excellent (if 45 degrees is “ideal”) for an average horse. Her neck is roughly the same length as her shoulder (yellow line) which means it is slightly short but by no means bad. Her neck attachment is pretty good as it is well above the point of her shoulder and ties into her withers smoothly. This neck attachment will give her the ability to use her neck independently to balance, which is needed for most sport disciplines but is particularly useful for dressage and jumping.

Her humerus is long and moderately sloped, which will increase her stride length and probably make up for her shorter shoulder. Since her humerus is more horizontal than it is upright she will not be able to tuck up here knees easily for large jumps but should be able to do so for smaller jumps just fine. Notice how she stands slightly camped under as a result of her more horizontal humerus (compare yellow line that is dropped straight down with the blue line following the natural line of her leg).

We can see from the thin blue line that this mare has good straight legs and a well-muscled forearm. Her front pastern angle is similar to her shoulder angle, though it appears a little more acute. The more acute angle may be a result of having slightly long pasterns (again, just slightly) and should result in a nice springy-ness to her stride.

Her hind end (denoted by pink lines) is well balanced. Her pelvis is medium-long and her croup is pretty flat, which will allow for a long stride with power over distance rather than short bursts of speed. Her thigh and gaskin areas are fairly weakly muscled in these pictures, but her stifle appears to be well conformed: flat and roughly “rectangular” shaped. Her hind legs have a good angle to them which will allow for good stress-absorption and the ability to reach under herself and lend power to her hindquarters for both dressage and jumping. Notice that she has a very high tail set only because this sometimes has the appearance of shortening the croup. It appears that she has capped hocks, which is just a blemish (usually caused by lying down or banging them) that shouldn’t affect soundness.

Overall this horse has very light bone, smaller-sized feet and small joints. Her frame is similarly fairly light (watch out for horses with heavy frames and light bone - NOT good!), but it will be especially important to make sure this horse stays a good weight to not put excess strain on her more delicate bones. Proper conditioning is especially important for horses with smaller joints. Luckily her short cannon bones will afford some strength to her lower legs and the angles on shoulder, hock and pastern are not upright, allowing for good stress distribution along her skeleton and hopefully fewer issues in her small feet.

In general this mare appears well suited for dressage and lower level jumping!

pleasure, tb, trail riding, dressage, jumper

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