Re: Looking for advice

tina hicks (hickst@puzzler.nichols.com)
Thu, 23 Jan 1997 11:56:03 -0600

At 08:39 AM 1/23/97 -0800, G&J Thom wrote:
>Okay so everyone got a good giggle out of my last question, so
>I thought I would try again. What I really should have asked was
>what do you look for in choosing your endurance horse.
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I don't know that there is such a thing as an "endurance horse", at least
not yet - there are some that are more suited to it than others but when you
go to a ride and see the variety that do it successfully you see that an
endurance horse is really "anyhorse". Anyhorse, that is, with decent
conformation, no major defects (i.e., has all four legs, etc), and a desire
to go down the trail. Most of us have taken the horse we had in the pasture
and turned him into an "endurance horse".

I would look for good feet and legs tho on whatever you buy - those are
going to take a beating in this sport. The old adage "No foot, no horse" (or
whatever) is really true here. In other sports, you can get by if your horse
is not really sound with bar shoes, elevator pads, a gram of bute, lots of
maintenance, etc, etc...Not so here - iffy feet/soundness don't cut it for
50 or 100 miles and ride after ride.

That is not to say that every horse you see doing this is 100% sound or
there aren't horses out there with some special shoeing or whatever - I'm
just saying if you can start with as close to ideal legs/feet as possible,
you'll be doing yourself a favor.

For me, an endurance horse has to have a pretty head (okay, for me, any
horse has to have a pretty head). I don't care that I don't ride the head -
I have to look at it. But that's a personal thing :-)

The other biggie is good, even gaits -are they the same to the right as to
the left? Does the horse move out from the shoulder? Track up behind? Is he
willing to move forward?

Sanity is nice but not a necessity if you have the other stuff :-)

Tina
Huntsville, AL
hickst@nichols.com