BUILT TO LAST
Two Saddlebred geldings illustrate a key component in performance and durability: a strong loin coupling.
My memories of Saddlebred horses go back 40 years, and in this article I’m going to show how two favorite geldings exemplify the conformation and pedigree of athletic horses that are built to last. Along the way, I want to emphasize a neglected, yet crucially important aspect of conformation analysis: how to identify horses with a strong loin coupling, without which no horse can achieve true collection.
Although this principle applies to all breeds, the focus here is on Saddlebreds because we’re midstream in our historical look at the breed. But I also happen to love Saddlebreds not only because they are great pleasure and show mounts, but for their potential as sporthorses. I’ve had Saddlebreds who could out-jump Thoroughbreds or Warmbloods; who were bold and smart enough to handle a Three-Day Event; and who made the most absolutely delightful dressage horses. I had one horse, not registered but descended in three lines from the best Saddlebred sporthorse bloodline, Rex Peavine—who could Spanish trot, levade, and piaffe—in pace!
A point that I have repeatedly made throughout this series on the history of American horse breeding is succinctly echoed by breed analyst Kathleen Kirsan:
“We have come so far from the roots of our native breeds, and they have become so specialized in our modern day, that we entirely miss what they are capable of and many are unaware of what top rate sporthorses [Saddlebreds] really are and have always been. Few of us realize that our domestic breeds, [including] the Saddlebred, are completely made up of sport genetics.”
Who would not love to own a horse so smart and kind, so well balanced, so willing and so athletic? I’ll tell you who: somebody who only knows Saddlebreds as they are shown in today’s style of “saddle seat” competition, with the weighted shoes and the artificial tails, and ridden—by the lights of the sporthorse world—high-headed and hollow-backed, i.e. “upside down.” All breeds encompass a variety of physical types and riding styles. That is well and good, there is room for variety. But in this article, we are not looking for the kind of
Saddlebred whose topline easily bends into a hollow “U” shape.
UNDERSTANDING “THE WOOD BETWEEN THE WORLDS”
I was in graduate school 40 years ago, operating on a very limited budget. Nothing, however, could prevent me from learning to ride. By offering to clean stalls, or do the feeding or turnout or groom or medicate or blanket horses—or help repair fences or mow the lawn or pick up trash—but mostly by just hanging out, by persistently asking questions—I traded time and a little sweat equity for lessons. I and my camera became a staple at several local stables, and that’s how I came to have the photo of the old Saddlebred gelding named Stonewall’s Easter Sunrise featured in this article. The original black and white print is now lost and the copies I have are faded, so I have brought the image back to life as a photorealistic painting which also depicts Easter’s rich chestnut coat and flashy white markings.
I don’t know Easter’s exact parentage, though I’m betting he was Missouri-bred. From his name one must guess that he was in part the product of Loula Long Combs’ breeding program at Longview Farm. She owned world champion Easter Cloud (foaled 1909, by McDonald Chief out of Lucy Congleton by Wyatt’s Red Cloud, a great-grandson of the original Black Hawk). Stonewall King (foaled 1920) must also have been in the picture, and I think most likely that Easter’s sire was a Stonewall King grandson called Ozark Stonewall—I remember a photo of this horse hanging on the tack-room wall. Stonewall King was by My King by Forest King, a grandson of Black Squirrel, Montrose, Bourbon Chief and Chester Dare (see “A Vintage Blend,” EQUUS
513). He carries multiple crosses to Rex Peavine, identified by Kirsan as the most important common denominator in the pedigrees of successful modern Saddlebred sporthorses such as Borealis and Harry Callahan.
Easter was owned by a Missouri college that had an equestrian program. Forty years ago, their students and recent graduates could lease school horses during the summer break. This allowed the horses to get a change from the ordinary while allowing their students—and the students of their students—the chance to ride quiet, experienced horses. Easter was certainly experienced, having been shown for years in the five-gaited gelding classes, but under saddle he was not what you would call “quiet.”
Easter was known as an “advanced” horse…the rider had to find a way to get along with him. I only got to ride him one time, and before I swung a leg over, I heard this warning from the woman who had him out on lease. She thought I could handle him, and she was right, but neither of us bargained on how much I was going to learn from just a single ride on this Saddlebred gelding who was nearing 20 years old at the time.
Easter’s great athleticism was instantly apparent to me the moment I sat down on him. I knew this was not a Volkswagen Beetle, it was some kind of souped-up muscle car. Nor had I ever met any horse with an emotional makeup like his. It would be 20 years before I found another one with a similar constitution. That horse was my half-bred gelding Painty, who I was able to buy because people called him crazy. Easter prepared me for Painty. I could be talking about either horse here. Neither of them cut you any slack because they did not have the internal “space” for that. As a ride progressed, they would become more and more energetic, and it would feel as if the horse might run away with you. It seemed they were constantly over-anticipating some ghostly announcer’s voice to come booming from on high crying “rack on!”
You had to talk them out of this anxiety, this desperate attempt to give all in order to please—or to get it over with. The rider had to provide a distraction, something the horse could focus on, something that would hold him in the present moment. In short, you had to pay attention to the horse’s very great need for direction.
If you didn’t provide that—or if you tried to exert control by holding the horse back with the reins—the animal would lose his mind. I mean this literally: He would lose track of his mind, a phenomenon I liken to C.S. Lewis’ concept of “the wood between the worlds”: a place where the spirit-consciousness, be that of man or animal, can flee to; where there is eternal silence, eternal calm and eternal
peace. It is a false Nirvana that every Zen master warns of, because once the mind has gone there once it becomes the easy option. Like a drug, it gives a false sense of well-being while preventing the horse from discovering how to find equanimity in this rough old world of reality.
The great Tom Dorrance helped me recognize what was going on in Painty’s head—that the horse was seeking an internal peace that he could not find on his own. Some may say that this implies an impossible level of insight, because in truth we cannot know what is going on in any animal’s mind. But the rough old world of reality repeatedly proved Dorrance right, in that his practical suggestions as to what the rider needed to do or
STOP doing—often very small and very subtle—were amazingly effective. To Dorrance, also, prevention was a large part of cure. He taught me always to be alert for physical discomfort in my horse, saying, “If the animal is uncomfortable physically he will soon be uncomfortable mentally.” In other words, on both the physical and the mental-emotional levels, discomfort that he cannot control or get rid of makes the horse want to flee.
The greatest source of discomfort for horses under saddle is that they are under saddle. The first and primary lesson that every horse needs to be taught, whether he is intended for pleasure or sport, is to carry a rider without losing his balance either physically or mentally. He must be taught how to carry the rider’s weight without tightening the muscles that run on either side of the spine that form the topline. He must be taught, instead, to support the rider’s weight by effort of the abdominal and internal “core” muscles—in other words, to use the “ring of muscles.”
Of course, if you want the opposite—if the trainer’s desire is to have the horse go upside down rather than round—then she does all she can to get the horse to lift its poll and “break the neck back,” which in turn will cause the perivertebral muscles to tighten and the back to drop. Over time—but especially in horses with long backs and tubular torsos—this produces the appearance shown in the sidebar “Only for Show.”
Long-backed horses have a better chance of handling a show career in which fashion demands that they be ridden upside down. Since virtually all horses have the same number of thoracic vertebrae, to make a horse conformationally longer in the back
means to make the thoracic and lumbar vertebrae individually longer. Since horses have 18 thoracics plus, in most cases, six lumbars only a little extra length—say a quarter inch more in each vertebra—will result in as much as seven inches of additional back length overall. Importantly, adding length to the vertebral centra widens the space between successive dorsal processes. If in a short-backed horse the dorsal spines located directly beneath the saddle—those that are most likely to bang into each other or “kiss” when the horse drops its back—are spread wider apart, the animal’s ability to drop its back without discomfort is greatly increased (see “History, Step by Step,” EQUUS 514).
This was not the case with either Painty or Easter. The two are remarkably similar in conformation and neither has a long back. Both also have a loin coupling that is short, wide and strong—in short, they are built to round up, not hollow out. Hollowing out makes them uncomfortable and restive. Painty was never shown in saddle-seat competition, but Easter’s history as a five-gaited competitor in the 1970’s meant that he was ridden upside down.
By the time I met them, both horses had learned to tighten their perivertebral muscles and hollow their back before taking a step, especially at the trot. In Painty this meant considerable time spent teaching him—primarily by use of lateral bending—to relax first, then go forward.
In Easter, upside-down riding resulted in the development of a “rough” coupling and possibly (though it is now impossible to prove) some “kissing” spines. This is the biggest conformational difference between Easter and Painty, whose topline remained smooth over the loins throughout his life.
who has done “OK” in show competition may turn out to be far more suitable—and far happier—as an enduro or dressage mount or a jumper. Most farms currently engaged in producing Saddlebreds hew to the current trends and place great value on success in the “big divisions” of saddle-seat competition. But every breeder has mares and geldings that they know are not going to be top winners in that context. These are the horses they have “around back,” and they are the animals that the buyer in search of the sporthorse type should ask to see. Buyers and breeders who understand the functional meaning of the horse’s conformation, and who are flexible enough to consider a wide variety of possible athletic careers for their horses, are far ahead of the game. Astute selection of structurally complementary sire and dam by knowledgeable, experienced breeders ultimately determines the direction a bloodline or a breed will go.
To get from Rex Peavine, who was foaled over a century ago, to the wonderful athletes of today, there had to be some fabulous broodmares. Genetics science tells us that females have as much or more to do with breeding outcomes as do males. There were people back in the 1920s and 1930s who sought to breed Saddlebreds that would stand up to considerable use outside the show arena—horses that could jump, that could cover a hundred miles of ground at a rack or a trot without undue fatigue and without going lame. These folks were active before Tom Bass died, before upside-down horses became the norm in saddle-seat competition and before breeding for the sort of horse that readily goes upside down became the norm. In our next issue, we’ll be taking a close look at the broodmares that helped Rex Peavine and related sires put their stamp on today’s Saddlebred sporthorses.