RE: [RC] Percentage body weight (was: Dainty horses) - suendavid
> Let's look at the sample for the study - it was 100 mile horses competing at > Tevis, which is point to point and mostly downhill. That could have a lot to > do with the results. The findings may not hold very well for return to camp > rides, or shorter rides.
Nobody has claimed the results DO hold true for any ride other than Tevis. Read the study.
What also skews the results is that a tired horse > often gets pulled lame, and isn't lame once rested.
So what? It was lame at the time of the vet examination, and that's the criteria. Same as for a metabolic pull, etc. Last I checked, there's no box on the vet cards that state "Tired and lame, but will probably be fine with some rest, so it's not really lame." Either a horse is grade 3 or more lame at time of exam, or it's not. Period. If the horse was lame secondary to metabolic factors, ie tying up, that's a metabolic pull and was categorized accordingly.
> I'd bet that lameness is much more strongly a function of going too fast for > conditions, where "too fast" is indeed a function of weight. Maybe we could > get Mike Maul or Truman to do a quick and dirty 'study' and look at > incidence of lameness pull by distance and weight division for a year or two > - let's see what a big data set has to say with lots of different rides > factored in.
LOL. If you can convince Mike or Truman that collecting and analyzing such data (which currently doesn't exist in AERC records under any methodology that could be considered valid by the wildest stretch of imagination) and also convince them it was a simple down and dirty study, God bless you. Personally, having ACTUAL experience of what's involved in such field work, I'm not holding my breath.
> I wouldn't be surprised if there were a correlation - greater stress on > everything for the heavier riders - but you can't prove it very well with > one highly skewed sample.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and bet that a) you haven't even read the study, b) you have no formal experience yourself in physiologic field methodology and data analysis, c) a small child has taken over the computer and logged on as David LeBlanc, or d) all of the above.
That's fine. I truly mean no offense, but there's a short list of people without some extremely advanced training that would qualify as a valid opinion if they called the statisitics faulty (after having, presumably, read the thing), but none of them are on Ridecamp, and Tom Ivers died last year As mentioned elsewhere, the stats already passed their trial by fire by the guys that write the textbooks, and their opinions aren't trumped by yours. Sorry. The information is there for people to use or not as they please, and if they choose to dismiss it entirely, that's okay with me, too. One of the many valuable lessons my dad the Marine taught me was not to piss into the wind.
I re-subscribed just long enough to add an explanation on the study, and I've done that. Since this discussion seems to have evolved past useful dissemination or explanation into the usual ridecamp trial by unqualified opinion, I'm happily going back into Unsubscribed Land and go do something more useful, like packing the trailer for a ride this weekend. Best of luck to all of you.
