On Monday I had my longest ride yet on Belle. So far, her rides have consisted of getting on, walking around aimlessly (steering is still a problem), getting off. I haven’t trotted but a few steps and those were mostly by accident. In the past month or so, however, Belle’s stopped looking like a kid-horse and started looking more adult, so I figured it was time to get serious.

I’ve been reading Reiner Klimke’s classic, Starting the Young Horse, which is stunningly hard to understand since whoever translated did a terrible job. Or maybe Klimke himself wrote it in English. The information I’m looking for seems crucial to starting a young horse, but seems to be absent from the text. How do I teach my horse to steer? Klimke skips right over this part, launching instead into a long discussion about the scale of training. Important information, to be sure, but you can’t achieve Losglassenheit, whatever that is, without steering. 

In the meantime, Belle and I are out in my arena, wandering. She likes to stay on the south end because her buddy Baleno is observing the proceedings from his pen there. So, while we manage, with leg and direct rein, to make it to the north end, she’s in a hurry to go back to the south. So we turn around again and go north, and again she goes south. When we get to the south end her neck turns into a big rubber band: It goes south even though I’m directing her head north.  So far this is me asking and her responding, eventually, and there haven’t been any temper tantrums, although she is little and quick. At one point she turned hard left and I almost didn’t.

On Monday, though, Belle was pretty cooperative. We walked in a somewhat straight line to the north end and then she let me regulate her walk with my seat. She did want to rush, but I made her wait for me, and she did. Then we actually did a kind of drunken serpentine at the trot, and then we trotted around the whole arena rail one entire time without veering off course. Much praise ensued.

Klimke’s book talks about lots of great theory, but what I’ve come to understand is that the answers are in the arena, not between the covers of a book. And while I keep trying to foist Belle off on other trainers for this particular part of the process, no one has time for her right now. So it’s up to me to direct her on the right path.

I know that some of the issues we’ve had with his training have to do with this unidentifiable, not-quite-even quality of his gaits. And I also know he probably hurts more than he lets on. Sometimes he will buck just once for no apparent reason. I’ve wondered if that buck was the equivalent to OUCH!!!

So since we’ve come to a screeching halt in his training—he went through a period of absolute and complete resistance, the vet came out yesterday for an exhaustive workup on his right hind leg. Nerve blocks in the fetlock, the hock and stifle (and an endless number of needles!) revealed nothing—his hitched gait didn’t change at all.

Discouraging as that might sound, at least we know it’s not his leg. So we’ve ruled out one structure. The bad news is that there’s no way to know, without some more advanced diagnostics, what’s wrong with B and what we should do about it.

Next step: Haul the horse to Colorado, Arizona or Texas for nuclear scintigraphy—commonly called a bone scan. How it works: a “tracer” is given to the horse orally, which than congregates in areas of damaged bones or structures, so the veterinarian can see the areas of change. Because we can’t tell whether it’s his hip, his back, or his neck that’s the problem, the bone scan will tell us how and where the treatment (whatever that is) should be administered.

Of course this presents its own set of problems: Money, for one. I’ll have to save for a few months—and that’s really the only problem, except that I need new tires on the trailer before I haul 500 miles, and probably should replace the stolen radio out of the truck, and get it fully tuned up, checked out and that pesky “stalling when I back up” problem is just like B’s hind end: undiagnosed to date.

So the treatment will be one set of costs. Getting to and from the treatment a whole other set of costs.

At times like this, I do wish that lotto ticket would come due. I’m not a gambling woman, but I’d like to give my horses every opportunity to feel their best. Maybe that’s excessive, or obsessive. But to me, it’s probably worth every cent.

The process involves much more than just throwing a saddle on the horse’s back and checking the points. Anne wants to see the horse move in walk, trot and canter. She walks alongside the horse’s shoulder and feels for pressure before watching the horse and rider trot and canter on a circle.

Once she’s seen if the saddle is balanced, how it sits on the horse and how the rider sits in the saddle, she tries a variety of pad configurations. I was happy to learn that Baleno’s saddle fits him well. We’ll be adding a different pad to relieve some of the pressure on his withers, but otherwise the saddle sits balanced and doesn’t press or hurt him in anyway.

Volare, however, was a different story. Sway-backed with high withers, I’d brought him along for fitting because his back has changed as he’s gotten older. The old KN saddle (bought 20 years ago, used) I ride him in is hard as concrete. I was hoping she could reflock it and check to see that it fits him property.

The saddle is far from balanced. Without pads, the cantle is three inches below the pommel. When I ride I often feel like I’m in a reclining chair. I’ve leveled it myself by padding it up with a fleece and bumper pad to level. Anne told me that the system works well, but that’s a lot of pads and a lot of pressure on the poor guy’s back. Instead, we tried a pad with inserts—a Mattes pad with Velcro pockets to which you can add small pads. Once we’d figured out how many inserts and in what combination, the saddle fit much better and Volare seemed much more comfortable. He moved more freely; his shoulders opened and his hind legs stepped under more actively.

It amazes me that I rode him in that ill fitting saddle for decades before I knew that it didn’t really fit him. I wonder how many horses are going around with a sore back from a poorly fit saddle, and how many people are fighting gravity to get into a correct riding position, as I was with Volare. Anne says you’d be surprised what people don’t know about saddle fit.

But they are breaking their bones.

When I turned on the Derby on Saturday, I had mixed feelings. I’m not a big fan of horse racing, because I know the horses are too young, their growth plates not yet matured enough to handle the strain of training and running, their health and readiness for such a level of competition only a mild thought in the minds of most trainers and owners. I know I’m making broad generalizations. I look at my own filly (age four) and realize she’s a baby—immature, gangly, hip higher than shoulder, unbalanced. She’s a well-bred sport horse but she’s nowhere near ready being able to compete even in a little local show.

And here we are, asking three year olds to run for their lives, literally. And not only that, but we’ve bred the hardiness right out of them. Check out Northern Dancer’s progeny and you find that, yes, indeed, he’s the winningest sire ever. But does that mean that all our race horses have the same bloodlines? And well, check out what such inbreeding has done to canine health. It doesn’t take a genetic expert to realize we’re over breeding our top horses. Our equine athletes are more prone to weakened anatomical structures and less able to physically withstand the unusual stress they’re put under.

I watched the race and sighed with relief when Big Brown ran clean and strong through the finish. And then I heard those words: “There’s a horse down. The filly is down,” and (like a NASCAR crash) the TV cameras cut to the outrider’s horse standing rider-less and the crowd of people clustered on the track around Eight Belles.

I turned the TV off. I did not want to know, to think or to hear about another equine casualty. A casualty, I think, of greed and competition gone wrong. Such accidents are bad for us horse people. They give the industry as a whole (from backyard to back stretch) a bad reputation—and then we loose spectators.

At the recent Equine Industry Summit (held in Lexington between Rolex and the Derby), several important race track marketing executives talked about the challenge of bringing people to the tracks rather than having them bet at home on their computers. When horses die for no other reason other than physiological (in other words, they were not injured in an accident of sport) it makes those marketing executives’ jobs that much harder.

Many horse people have their first equine experiences at the track. Many of the finest, most ethical trainers and riders I know started out there. If horse racing continues to show the worst of the sport (over bred, immature horses) in action, we’ll lose those potential riders/horse owners in the future. It will hurt the industry.  Do I want horse racing to go away completely? I don’t know the answer to that. We’d lose the most visible element of our industry—an element that brings people to the kinder, gentler world of horses. Would I like it to be safer? Oh yes, of course. I prefer to see the horses run when they’re seven, eight and nine, when they’re strong, robust adult horses at their prime and when the jockeys don’t have to starve themselves to make weight. I don’t know the answer. I do know I may never watch another Derby. I just can’t take it.