The Hidden Cause of Chronic Lameness — Dr. Karen Gellman

So what do you think leads horses out of this correct neutral posture? I mean, I've seen my horses be a bit wild in the paddock and, you know, I do a lot of ex-race horses who primarily work on one lead and some of them come off the track and they can stand perfectly square on the cross ties with their head pretty level with the rest of their body and other ones come off the track and like, They have a leg in Texas and they have a leg in Maine and, you know, it's the heads up here.

And so what do you think starts that the issue of them not being able to be neutral?

So we've identified through our research and again, to give credit where credit is due, Dr. Shoemaker has been doing this for 45 years and she figured it out with the top level performance forces that she was treating.

Up and down the East Coast.

She's licensed in 17 states.

So she was seeing the best of the best and figuring out that there was something consistently wrong with the horses who were presenting with poor performance and chronic injuries.

And that was not standing up straight.

And the three factors that she identified was, number one, it shouldn't be any surprise, the hooves.

So whether the horse's hooves were correctly trimmed and shod so that they were balanced and correct with respect to the rest of the body.

Number two, this one is a little odd.

People don't think about it unless they talk to us, which is the dentition.

So as you know, horses' teeth continue to wear down and erupt throughout their lives.

So if a horse is kind of always like...

When swept off to the side and leaning, their jaw will actually lean with them.

And if they're eating in that position, things will become asymmetrical in their mouths.

More to the point, what we find that is a problem for posture is horses who either have an overbite, essentially, so that their upper teeth hang over their lower teeth.

when they're in kind of a neutral head position.

So what you were just describing, you know, kind of the head level with the neck, the way a horse is standing when they're not doing anything in particular, if their front teeth hang over their bottom teeth, that is what's called an overjet in equine dental language.

And that is associated with a change in the posture.

The third thing is pretty obvious.

It's how the head and the neck are relating to each other.

So you know that the pole is obviously really important for riding.

And we pull horses around by their pole all the time.

So there are a lot of horses who have dysfunctions in their pole from the work that they're doing, how they're handled, or from an accident that's not anybody's fault.

So those are the three main factors.