| May 2007 - Washoe Valley: Dave Cootware had brought along a horse scale for us to play with, so I got to weigh Roo several times: Friday evening: 860 lbs Saturday: 820 lbs (right after the ride) Saturday: 838 lbs (after eating/drinking for a couple of hours/wearing his blankie) Sunday: 830 lbs (right after the ride) (Peggy [Davidson] weighed Dakota on Saturday after the ride and he was 1022 lbs!) |
| June 2007 - Horse Expo: ...Watched another demo by Jec Ballou... Afterwards I went to talk to her about what I could best do with Roo. She suggested that I work on speeding up and slowing down at the trot with him - to work his sacroiliac area and persuade him to drop his head. She said with the pelvis tilted down (from a high head and hollow back), they tend to stab their back legs into the ground and will get problems from that. She also said that walking hills developed the best muscling. She said you'll often see endurance horses with a line down the center of their hips, dividing the two sides of the muscle - probably because they've been trotting up hills and got strong, but not uniformly so. She said you're aiming for a nice round muscle. |
Predictably, I haven't worked on this, he does still stab his back feet at times, and has developed a lovely crease down the center of his butt muscles. But that said, I very seldom let him trot up hills - we almost always walk them, so maybe it's just how he's built?
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