As you can see in the initial photos Bryan was deeply tied in in front of the
withers with a strongly developed underneck.
Twenty years ago I would have felt
this was just a conformational defect. Now I know that it is a reflection of
soundness and movement anomalies, and that with the correct approaches, can and
will change. There are of course conformational defects in necks…like the
‘Nest’, wherein the neck comes so low out of the body it looks like the horse
has no chest. You can’t do much about where the neck comes out of the body. But
you can do remarkable things with the neck itself, and the way it ties in to
the wither and the shoulder.
There are several excellent treatises in the subject so
rather than go in to a lot of detail I refer you to Hillary Clayton, Jean Luc
Cornille, Jean Claude Racinet, Phillippe Karl, Gerd Heuschmann, and Mary
DeBono, the Feldenkrais practitioner who has applied the work to horses. All of
these riders have studied the biomechanics of movement and the neck; knowing
their work and their conclusions is vital to understanding how the neck
functions. I don’t want to write a textbook, and lucky for me I needn’t, as
these riders/writers/vets/body workers have already done so. I *would* like to
show you how understanding and applying their work has changed the necks and
shoulders of the horses in my care.
Fixing a neck is a process. You first need to work on the
physical neck itself, releasing the muscle spasms that are contributing to the
imbalances. This would include Mary’s SENSE work and/or Jack Meagher’s deep
tissue work, hand massagers, infrared, pulsed magnetic, whatever therapeutic
device you have at your disposal. You can’t rebuild until you release the
holding patterns. Meanwhile, you must study the horse’s body and how he uses
himself. A wrecked neck has been compensating for a stiff back, sore hocks, sore feet,
imbalanced feet, sore stifles, whatever; a neck is a reflection of the rest of
the body. Then you must address the way the horse is ridden; in ‘collection’,
or ‘in a frame’ or any of the other misunderstood things we think we are doing.
And last you must study and change the rider. A crooked rider produces a crooked horse. A
crooked rider who is always going to the rein or the draw rein or the side rein
to try to straighten a crooked horse is guaranteed a wrecked neck.
We did all of these things with Bryan. And they paid off.
Whoa!! What an incredible difference. Excellent.
ReplyDeleteHey Elaine! Thanks! He changed even more after this, after we took his shoes off. I learned so much from him, and yes, he was not even recognizable as the same horse. He always was over at the knees and never would have won a hunter conformation class, but he did get Very Cute >;->
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