If you read the references, they aren’t saying the horse’s are dead/lame within 4 years, but that this is the average: so a significant amount are culled/moved to another discipline within the first few years, which skews the average. Remember these studies were done in Europe…I don’t think they counted cross pole jumpers as being “functional”. What is also interesting, is that horses that started competing at 4, on average, had longer functional lives as jumpers that horses who first competed at 5 or 6.
You need to show the good, the not-so good and the bad and create a rounded study, not the one you want to see, or want others to see.
I think a broad type of study would be to difficult. A race horse starts his racing career usually at 2 and can end it anywhere from 3 to 15. A horse that ends it at 3 isn’t necessarily due to injury and isn’t necessarily going on to another career. some may just not be fast enough but others may be to valuable in the breeding shed. The Triple Crown is fought between 3 year old stallions (99% of the time). A horse that wins is going to get a LOT of money breeding - why race the horse anymore and risk injury when you can retire and make a ton of cash in the next few years?
Many are just not fast enough and come off the track by 5 years old. A 10 year old is considered a warrior.
On the other hand, it takes a dressage horse the first 8 or more years of it’s life to learn the FEI movements and be strong/balanced enough to be competitive. So a dressage horse is not STARTING it’s career until the race horse’s career is over.
These are just two examples of how a broad study is not effective. Maybe you could study just the years the horse is at the elite level - so start the dressage horse at 8 and the racehorse at 2…but that still doesn’t account for the Triple Crown/big money winning horses retiring to the breeding shed earlier than a dressage horse would. The money a dressage horse gets for breeding pales in comparison to what a race horse gets and that colos how their careers are viewed.
A lot of the Western Disciplines also get a lot of money in the breeding shed, while Eventing is practically nil and show jumping and saddle seat perhaps somewhere in the middle.
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I think you could do a survey of senior horses and their current fitness, and gather data on their work history. I could see an academic study but I could also see one of the drug companies doing it, and adding in the use of their drug and their competitors, lol. I’m still hopeful someone will chime in with more existing research… but good info in this thread!
I’m not sure there’s anything gained by anyone researching senior horses… hence the lack of research.
Even drug companies only stand to gain a pittance compared to what is spent on young, active competitors.
Can you share a link to the article?
My old horse is 23 years old and a retired multiple superior AQHA pleasure horse. He has top 5 finishes at all the big shows and beat the horses to beat. Oh, and he has a NASTY club foot. Have a mentioned he’s still sound and is a BLAST to rid?
I think the survivorship/selection bias of the sampling would require careful study design… My horse was a WP horse in his younger days before I knew him. He has conformation defects that would make someone run from buying him to train in a high-impact jumping discipline like eventing or for endurance. Instead he was trained in a discipline where that didn’t matter because he could go at a slow jog with a kid, wear a lot of bling, and look pretty. So now that he’s old and has (perhaps) more arthritis than his similar-aged stall neighbor who jumps- it would be a mistake IMO to assign the cause of the arthritis to his past discipline history.
(The question of whether breeders geared to different disciplines are more permissive of traits that will affect long-term soundness is slightly different than the question of whether the actually training regime of the discipline affects soundness. )
I don’t know about an official study, but I’ve always thought it would be interesting to get information on people’s horses, like age/sex/breed/discipline, what age they started under saddle, how they started, any issues and what age it showed up, etc. I don’t think the information would be useful in a research way since there are too many variables, but just as an informative thing, I think it would be interesting. If anyone ever wants to do something like that, I would happily give information on all the horses I’ve owned!
