Re: RC: Re: ti's "article"

["Susan Evans Garlinghouse" <suendavid@worldnet.att.net>]

>
>Egad, Susan, we're starting to agree. Let's talk politics instead.

OK.  You call me a Poobah in Training and I'll call you a one-trick pony and
let's get back to familiar terrotory. <g>



>Nothing I hate worse than illicit muscle cell hypertrophy. Whatever you do
>with the horse, it's body's first priority is going to be to repair weak
>tissue, not to store fat.

Sure.  Repair---but not do much more than that.  Six months down the road,
that horse isn't going to be able to do much more than stagger once around
the arena before he's tired.  At, under extreme circumstances, you can put
body fat back on, but the protein stores are gone for good.  Have you ever
seen a horse close to a starvation death?  Not only is the muscle mass gone,
but the body has started to catabolize the cartilage in joints and soft
tissue as well, and the pasterns are down to the ground, and no angle left
to the hocks.  You could put fat back on these guys, but all of the
associated tissues are pretty much gone for good.




>I can't agree more. Body scoring delivers almost no genuine information and
>leads to false assumptions all around.

Well, quantitative information, no.  I can't take a horse with a CS of 5 and
give you any hard data about his aerobic capacity, stroke volume, etc---but
as a comparative management took, it's pretty damn handy, especially since
it doesn't require fancy equipment.


However, there is going to be a
>practical priority in gains in these areas and that priority goes to lean
>tissue, always.

Agreed.


Once there is excess energy, after all the rebuilding is done,
>and the body score has changed dramatically, then there will be deposition
of
>fat in certain very specific areas.

I think we disagree a bit about how much repair is going to occur
independent of work to illicit further response; and once a muscle cell has
been totally catabolized, it aint coming back no matter what you do.

I'll send you a copy of my ICEEP paper and tell me if you agree with my
conclusions about CS in endurance horses.  My feeling is that actual fat on
board isn't the important thing to consider when you look at an endurance
horse with CS of 3 vs 5, it's just an indicator of more important things.
There may be some very minor effects on substrate availability, but I doubt
very much.  IMO, an endurance horse of CS 3 in all likelihood hasn't been
truly starved per se, he's probably just working alot harder and expending
more energy than he's taking in, and the body is having to burn body stores
to supply the fuel.  At a certain point, not only adipose tissue but also
lean muscle mass is being catabolized---which means that the same work load
is now being relegated to lesser and lesser amounts of muscle, which in turn
are going to fatigue faster and push the horse closer to enzymatic and
energetic exhaustion and therefore failure.  On the other hand, a horse in
that ideal window of CS 5 or so has just the smallest amount of fat cover
(and there are areas where it is clearly fat deposition, like around the
tailhead).  The presence of small depositions of adipose tissue indicate (to
me) that the body is in positive energy balance, that lean muscle mass is
not being catabolized for energy costs and therefore the available
force-producing components of the body are as present and available as the
conditioning program allows them to be (in other words, the body's been in
an anabolic state, not catabolic, so whatever muscle you put on through
conditioning is still there).

I think we're probably saying pretty much the same thing---just some minor
differences in  interpretation of what CS implies.

See ya,

Susan G



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