Function Follows Form. Who Knew??

You know those Conformation Clinics they do in just about every equine publication?  The ones where you have to pick the horse whose confirmation best suits a particular job?  I suck at those.  Never fails.  I never pick the right horse.  Worse yet, I simply cannot see half the stuff the author tells me is wrong with the horse.  She'll say one horse has really long pasterns, and the horse that beat it has great pasterns, but the winner's pasterns will inevitably look 2" longer to me. 

I bring this up because confirmation faults have bitten me in the tuckus in both my equine life AND my personal life.  It comes as no surprise that Sug's upright pasterns predisposed her to osteoarthritis in her coffin joints.  She's a bit tied in behind the knee, which could have contributed to our current issues with suspensory branch  inflammation.  If we ever decided to breed her (she's very well bred and was a broodmare in her past life) we'd have to choose a stallion with excellent leg conformation in hopes of getting a foal with better legs.

What is surprising me at the moment is that recent events with my kids suggest I should have put more thought into my own stallion selection.  My stallion  husband has lousy stifles knees and hooves feett .  Oh, yeah, and a slight curvature of the spine. Both my kids are in physical therapy for knee issues that are directly related to poor knee structure.  Both also have faulty foot alignment that leads to uneven gaits that cause heel pain in the one and compounds the knee pain in the other.  Thankfully their backs are strong and straight.

I am currently in physical therapy as well (cue Sly and the Family Stone's, "It's a Family Affaaaaiiiiiiir...) but my problems stem from old injuries, not poor conformation.  As a broodmare, I bring crappy teeth and poor eyesight to the gene pool.

The stallion in question, for all his conformation issues, is in great shape, active as heck, and is the only one of the lot of us that is not in PT, mainlining supplements, or getting regular massages and/or chiropractic.  Unless you count the cats.

Go figure.

In the Spring a Broad's Fancy Lightly Turns to Thoughts of...STALLIONS!

I apologize for the mangled reference to the Tennyson poem.  I simply couldn't help myself.

Let me qualify this post by saying the following: THIS IS A COMPLETE FANTASY.  IT HAS NO CHANCE OF HAPPENING.  Not on this planet or the next.  For many reasons. Number one being that I have no idea what I am doing, number two that even if I did, I do not have the money to support the resulting foal, and number three, there are a gazillion other horses currently on the planet that need homes. There are more reasons, but those are the top three. That being said, a broad can dream, right? 

So, when Spring is Sprung and my mailbox is filled with stallion issues from the plethora of equine publications I subscribe to, I find myself looking through breeding values and picking out potential Sugar Daddies.  I've literally spent hours researching what stallion and dam lines would potentially cross well with my Indoctro ds.Nimmerdor mare.  Again, one can argue that this is a COLOSSAL waste of time, but then, I'm learning new things, and learning is a good thing, right? (Classic example of rationalization, yes?)

Why would I want to do something as silly as breed my mare, when she's not a perfect specimen, conformationally speaking? Well, I suppose because (and I know this is selfish and self-serving, but remember, this is never gonna happen!) she's the most amazing horse I've known and I want to have something of her when she's gone.  Yep, I know, bad reason. 

She also has an amazing brain, and is incredibly intelligent, willing, and rideable.  Set out a gymnastic, and Sug figures it out first time through.  My trainer has joked that when she sets a course, she swears Sug sneaks out of her stall and studies it at night, because she seems to know the questions it asks from the start.  Basically, my trainer has told me (I like to think lovingly) to let the horse do the thinking for me, because she's better at it. 

And the mare LOVES her job.  She WANTS to jump.  If she doesn't jump for a while, she will start pulling me towards fences in the ring.  I can tell she gets bored with the piddly 3' stuff I jump, so every now and then I ask my trainer to give her a little fun and school her over something bigger.  Lastly, I've done clinics with a former Olympic rider, and every time her sees her, he tells me what a wonderful horse she is, how lucky I am to have stumbled on a class animal like her, and has even asked if I've considered breeding her.  To which I answered, "Nope. I don't have the money.  I don't know what I am doing. I am completely winging it with my human children, which is bad enough, and Lord knows I have no clue how to raise equine babies."

So, it's Spring.  And I've got about half a dozen stallion issues strewn about with dog-eared pages.  And I'm up to my eyeballs in pink and blue thoughts and images of a little bay baby cavorting around green fields.  And then I imagine that baby has grown up and is in the ring with either my daughter, my son, or myself.

Somebody smack me.  HARD.