So, I am not entirely sure it’s necessary, but I’m going to zip my flame suit for this one.
When someone tells me they “rehabbed” a horse from an injury, I rarely take anything they say at face value. Here’s why:
If you consider the anatomy of an injury in a HUMAN - forget the horse for a moment - you have several phases. You have the traumatic event that precipitates the injury. You have the reaction phase in which there may or not be much pain or immobility but there’s certainly changes happening in the injury site as the body reacts to the injury. You then have regeneration phase, where the body is starting to do things like create scar tissue, repair nerve damage, etc. You then have the remodeling phase, where the body has done what it needs to do to heal the injured area but where the human is still actively working on things like correcting faulty body mechanics, strengthening weakened areas, reducing chronic tension in the affected areas, etc.
Most people are pretty good at the reaction and regeneration phases because we don’t really have to do much for these. We take some pain medication, limit activities that cause the area further problems and allow our bodies to do what they do.
Most people are pretty awful at the restoration phase, and yet it is the most important phase to avoid long-term issues after injury. This is where you do things like physical therapy, strengthening, scar tissue mobilization, manual work, etc to make sure that you RESTORE the area to full function.
So now imagine a horse that has a traumatic injury. We as the handlers are pretty good at the first two phases: we do stall rest, manual therapies, Bute, etc. But once again, we’re pretty bad at the third phase. On top of that, we’re dealing with an animal that is going to do everything it can to avoid pain and discomfort and is really, really good at developing compensatory patterns to do so. Those animals aren’t going to change whatever habits they developed during the first two phases of the injury on their own. They need a handler or rider to, over time, break down those compensations and show the horse the path to fully restored function.
That third phase for horses has every bit to do with how they are worked. Most people think of “work” in increments of gait, i.e. we hand-walk, then we tack walk, then we start introducing trot sets, then we introduce canter, etc. But what is so much more important is HOW the horse is being asked to move during all this: it’s not enough to walk if the walk is crooked and the horse is loading one hock more than the other. It’s not enough to trot if the horse isn’t being asked to swing through each side of his body equally. And this mare, from the sounds of it, has gotten little to no work. So she has been left entirely to her own devices after the knee injury to carry herself however she saw fit. She’s starting the restoration phase, essentially.
So yes, I’d expect she’d be right side sore/tense. She’s been guarding that right knee for over a year. She’s developed compensations to protect herself and those compensations don’t disappear just because the injured site has healed. She needs slow, consistent work to break down those patterns and re-teach her how to carry herself so that she doesn’t end up with excessive wear and tear in other areas that have been doing more than their fair share of the work.
