April 2008 • VOLUME 32 • © HORSES For LIFE™ Magazine

All of these horses are unhealthy. All of them suffer – some worse than others. The damage ranges from painful traumas to chronic back injuries.

It is interesting that the “owners” of all three horses had no idea that their horses were seriously ill and they messed around with them (and still do!), to what they call “the max” (training, taking part in competitions etc).

The three backs are very typical. In equestrian sport, there are no other backs.

Maybe these images serve as a kind of a mirage, illusion or the falsity of a spurious device?
Or maybe they are fantasies of the School which wants to justify its “incredibly strict” SPATIUM and interdicts?

No. The severe back injuries of all sports horses is a scientifically proven fact.

Let’s take a paradigmatic academic edition which has the status of a textbook, “Principles and Practice of Equestrian Sport Medicine” under the editorship of D.R. Hodson and R.J. Rose, open to the eighth chapter – “Muscle anatomy, physiology and adaptation to training exercises” which was written in association with professors of veterinary medicine, David Show (Australia) and Stephany Yalberg (the USA).

And what do we see?
Bah! We’ll see a terrible (but so well-known) list of typical myopathies (disorders involving muscle) and the first of them – destruction (inner crush injury) of muscular tissues, which is caused by the leaking of myoglobine and other contents of the cells into the blood-vascular system, and mitochondrial muscle dysfunction.

As a standard problem we’ll see damage to the muscle structure and as a consequence – intermittent muscle spasm.

The trauma of inner rupture of muscular tissue is described as a typical one.

This fact, which is delicately not announced by the School, which doesn’t want to pile on the pressure, is however, clearly described by the veterinary sports textbook. What I refer to is necrosis (death) of skeletal muscles.

However, I will have to return to the necrosis of skeletal muscles as a result of forced collection.

So, what is interdicted by the School is, as it turns out, known to sports medicine. The difference is that the School, from the very beginning, ignores the reason for the problem, and the sports veterinary industry sadly only attempts to gauge its outcomes by deducing how severe the necrosis of the muscle is by observing to what degree the muscle is being transformed into unelastic fibrotic tissue.

The School interdicts, readings from a diagnostic computer and the scientific facts of veterinary medicine, as you can see, say 100% the same thing. (Who would have had any doubts!)
In other words, when we say “sports horse”, we say “invalid horse”. This is about equestrian sport of all levels, from horse hire to the Olympics.

But I have already mentioned that the owners of the three horses whose thermographic images were shown as examples of grave pathology, were absolutely sure that their horses were healthy.

Sounds strange, doesn’t it?

In this case one really sad factor appears: when the pain becomes chronic, the horse physiologically understands that any opposition leads to much more painful feelings than so-called obedience, and compliantly performs show-jumping or dressage patterns.

In addition, the horse has the exact physiological knowledge that any opposition will lead to more pain or discomfort.

Moreover, the equestrian sport practice assumes “the traumatic calm” of a horse, however strange it may sound.

Brazen-faced Salomon de la Broue wrote about it honestly . A couple of centuries later, Prussian and German theorists of cavalry repeat after de la Broue, that “only after something hurts the horse does he becomes truly obedient”.

In actual fact usually only serious internal injuries and pathologies give complete power to a rider.

The nature of every trauma, of every pathology, is that its chronic, smoldering state is less painful than the outbreak, the attack of pain, which is unavoidable while resisting.

And only when the pain itself becomes excessive and reaches a lasting apogee in so-called work, does the horse decide to mutiny, physiologically realizing that the highest point of pain has already been reached, and although there is little hope of escaping the creature who is torturing him, hope exists

– and it is worth chancing.

Well, honestly, I didn’t want to show it so as not to offend any extra sensitive reader too much, but I’m afraid I have to.

Here is the photo of the autopsy of a horse who was considered to be absolutely healthy. (Muscle-wise, at least.)

In the photos you can easily see the affected regions. That is necrosis of skeletal muscles