Re: Feet

["Dave & Abby Bloxsom" <cyclone@snet.net>]

> Abby, you said it all when you stated "...in my extremely limited
> 3-(Morgan) horse experience... Morgans have club feet."    I repeat my
> answer,  As a breed,  Like Hell They Do.

I think Heidi picked up on the fact that I was talking about Morgan
Rejects - and I hope somebody realized that out of over 100 rejected horses,
we've had only THREE that were Morgans ... and they were REALLY bad too.
We've had Arabs & TB's by the dozens, QH, Appy, Stbds by the handfuls ... I
honestly think that this says a lot about Morgans *as a breed*.

> With a bit more experience
> with Morgans than you, by a factor of at least 10,  I have yet to see a
> club-footed Morgan.

Well, I have to confess to having skewed the figures a bit.  I was writing
originally about the Morgans whose feet I'd *known intimately*, not about
the Morgans I've known.  Growing up as a distance rider in New England, I'd
have to be blind to have missed the many, many fine Morgans around me.  Had
'em in the family, judged 'em on the trail, competed against 'em in all
kinds of endeavors ... and I do love them. But I've never shoed them.  I've
also known only one other horse in my life who had a club foot, and he was a
section B Welsh pony.

So there.

>      Check out Nancy Loving's  excellent book,  "Conformation and
> Performance,"

and for those who are interested, Linda Merims gave us pages and pages of
stuff on club feet last year sometime in the archives.

>Can we
> agree to defer to her as THE authority?

Never let it be said that I deferred to *anyone* as THE authority on
anything.  There are lots of people whose opinions I value highly, some very
highly (and Nancy is one, some of the rest of you are out there).  But I
Make My Own Decisions.

Heidi said:
>Actually, I'll go one further than Nancy and say that it is MOST prevalent
in
>Arabs and QH's!  So the Morgan cases most likely WERE nutritional/neglect
in
>these cases (as Nancy descibed), especially considereing their source.

Considering the source, I agree.  So there.

-Abby