Re: RC: Re: Amblin', not Foxtrottin'

[CMKSAGEHIL@aol.com]

In a message dated 6/17/00 9:46:34 AM Pacific Daylight Time, 
truman.prevatt@netsrq.com writes:

<< She will trot on down a
 paved road where I will get off an walk my arabs.  >>

Guess it all boils down to the individuals you've been privileged to know.  
One of my strategies when I was younger and fitter and more competitive was 
to stay on and trot in virtually all terrain that others got off and led--and 
on Arabs.  I likewise don't like and don't use borium.  But then my 
background was chasing cows in the central Idaho mountains, often at 
breakneck speed in terrain that would make most endurance riders cringe--and 
our Arab crosses (and later our purebreds) were SUCH an improvement over our 
other horses.  We only had one other horse that could hold a candle to 
them--and she was a very well-built 15/16 TB mare that was the product of 
breeding up via the old Remount program.  My husband calls our Arabs "clever" 
horses because they seem to always have a foot where they need one, and can 
maneuver the worst terrain at speed and make it seem like play.

Yes, I've seen some pretty klutzy Arabs--and in my book they are culls.  A 
horse that cannot keep its footing is a danger to ride, regardless of the 
breed.  And again, good ones occur in every breed.  You are blessed with a 
good TWH--and more power to her.  But to make generalizations about Arabs 
that they are less than sure-footed AS A BREED is not very accurate.

It is also not accurate to blame gaitedness per se for lack of agility--NO 
gait (not even the "regulars" of walk, trot, or canter) are executed in a 
pure fashion on bad terrain.  What matters is the athletic ability to adapt 
whatever the gait to the terrain at hand.  In fact, I've found that a great 
many of the VERY agile Arabs I've ridden have a tendency to break into some 
version of a 4-beat gait (call it amble or singlefoot) to negotiate bad 
terrain--it's like having some sort of Posi-Trac all-wheel drive in which the 
reflex sequence that causes gaits can be disrupted to make each leg 
independent to go wherever it has to go.  This ability seems to be 
independent of a horse's breed or preferred gait--kinda like you can get 4WD 
in different makes, but if you ain't got it, you ain't got it, no matter WHAT 
the make!  Quite frankly, I think the Arabs that have been so highly selected 
for a very pure "action" trot tend to lose some of this, as likely do some of 
the gaited horses where there has been far too much selection for an 
extremeness of gait rather than overall athletic ability.  The original 
gaited horses may well have been utilized in flatter areas of the country, 
but the ones being used for actual field work were NOT being ridden in laser 
planed fields or in freshly smoothed and dragged arenas--rather they went 
where the roads and paths went, and did what they had to do.  Once again, you 
get down to the concept that in order to have good endurance horses, one 
needs to choose for the traits that many of our breeds had back in their 
WORKING days rather than the extremes that have been bred for the show world 
in later years.

Heidi