I wouldn’t call him plain either, but I will say that his gaits are being manipulated even at the young age of 5 in the video. Many studs will only show a stallion under saddle where the gaits are being manipulated by their excellent riders. Many are quite ordinary (or simply slightly above average) movers prior to their stellar riding and training. It seems a lot of people believe that these horses constantly move the way they do when under saddle and that simply isn’t so.
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How on earth does PSSM contribute to extra flashy, “disunited” trot movement?
Are we saying breeders are breeding for PSSM at this point?
What the heck?
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What?
I’m LOLing at the stills, because here’s a still from my OTTB’s free video. I guess we’re a specialty bred, dressage moving freak now! Ooooo the front leg is still on the ground while the hind is in flight!!
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Haha. According to the woman on the Equo videos, it’s not just on the ground, it’s bearing the entire weight of the horse. Bwahahaaa rofl. I just can’t even with all the nonsense.
Pretty pony, btw! 
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The vet Dr. Katharina Ros, in the video posted at the top of this thread, discusses how current breeding practices are causing more and more sporthorses that she personally sees in her sporthorse practice to have more and more problems. She discusses the reasons for it, including genetic defects being passed down to large pools of offspring by fashionable, hypermobile, young, unproven stallions. She also makes sure to say that it is a set of interconnected issues that need to be addressed in their complexity, and asap. I agree with her. As long as the consumer demand for such weakened riding horses is up, the breeders will be breeding for it, further reducing the gene pool of warmbloods that can stay active and sound through their teens and twenties. She says that the vets are glad to be making a living from the industry, but she feels she personally and we all need to speak up to effect changes, now. She goes against the current mainstream here, she shines a light —#forthehorse. The interview series is getting a lot of attention, as it should, and merits further discussion on all levels.
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What is the link between this “hypermobility” and PSSM? I personally have yet to meet a horse that would fit both categories. Doesn’t mean there aren’t some, but if there is a link I’d love to know about it. I’m sure breeders would also love to know, because anyone who has had to deal with the giant pain in the ass of managing a PSSM horse would likely not be a repeat customer of breeders who have that issue in their gene pool and are not trying to eliminate it.
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There is some anecdotal evidence that certain myopathies, like PSSM, may be linked indirectly with characteristics like movement or type. PSSM may have become so common in WBs because it piggybacked on desirable traits like elasticity, movement, or suppleness. It’s not really well understood how carrier-but-not-affected status changes things for PSSM, WFFS, ESPA/DSLD, etc.
It’s been discussed on COTH. I remember @JB once summed it up nicely, maybe they remember and can share.
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I’ll nit-pick a little bit here.
First of all, stunning horse.
But what I see is diagonal pairs that are (properly) moving in tandem. Both the right front and the left hind appear to be touching the ground with the front edge of the hoof. It may be that the left hind is marginally higher–it’s hard to tell because it looks like the ground nearest the fence is somewhat higher than the ground on the track where the right fore is.
Anyway, I’m hardly an expert.
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I don’t think I’ve run across anything linking PSSM (of any type) to big flashy movement. That seems a bit counterintuitive since these are muscle diseases which make it hard to properly use muscles, and if anything, they tend to be tight movers, shorter striding, at least until their myopathy is managed.
Big flashy movement like that usually comes from elasticity of ligaments and tendons. This means things like the carriers of FFS (fragile foal syndrome, formerly WFFS but it’s not restricted to Warmbloods)), ESPA (formerly DSLD) and who knows how many similar issues to ESPA. Some think it can be related to Wobblers on some low level.
But I’m not aware of muscle diseases being even correlated to big movement.
Clarification - HYPP was (erroneously) thought to be responsible for the heavy muscling that made Impressive the winning Halter horse he was. HYPP wasn’t even a though in a brain for years, but people bred out the wazoo to Impressive because of his phenotype and his record. even when HYPP became a thing, people still though they NEEDED it to get the muscling. They ignored how many ?H horses were lean, and goodness, look at all the nH HUS horses who are the definition of lean.
HERDA may or may not be linked to performance, It just happens that the founding line was a high winning stallion,so like Impressive, was bred to a LOT, long before HERDA was recognized, especially since it took a while for homozygous horses to be bred (and unlike HYPP, hetero HERDA horses aren’t diseased). Some research has shown increased stretching ability of the HERDA carrier’s ligaments and/or tendons (I don’t remember which), but nothing has shown that improves their performance. Is that line so successful because of carrying HERDA? Or did HERDA just come along for the ride because it happened to mutate in a horse who would have been successful without it? Nobody knows, yet. But, there are certain enough winning non-HERDA carriers to support that it’s not HERDA that’s doing the work
the blame for this goes to the judges who, over the last decades, have rewarded bigness of gait over purity of gait and proper engagement. That has led to breeding horses with impure gaits, and questionable training practices to encourage giant movement up front while ignoring the hind end.
Judges are to blame for the current Halter Horse issue of utterly straight hind legs, vertical pasterns and tiny useless necks. Breeders and buyers aren’t stupid when it comes to buying/breeding what is winning. They ARE stupid when they don’t understand how they are ruining the horse.
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Absolutely. The judges are neither selling nor buying, but are uniquely positioned in this complexity to exert great influence by how they judge a competition. When renowned five star judges speak up in interviews against abusive training methods, they are suspended and sued. Judges’ influence in the discussions is hence clearly limited, as it should be, and the task of shining a light on the current state of affairs remains with the public: the breeders, riders, buyers. The more voices, the better.
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As for ECVM, it’s definitely in TBs. My chiro vet says there is a study narrowing down the gene in TBs. More work to be done on WBs. The thing is that unless the horse is a Wobbler also, most likely the major deficits aren’t going to affect the super young TBs racing. Or if it does, maybe those are the TBs who take one catastrophic “bad step”. A lot of the time, unlike Wobblers syndrome for the young horse, the defect doesn’t start causing major problems (progression of OA, spinal instability, neuro problems) until a bit older. Kind of like the problem with breeding horses with DSLD where they’ve had however many offspring before the disease becomes apparent.
We really haven’t been scrutinizing necks for very long for horses that aren’t neuro already. Even though the defect would be there at birth. It’s also not always easy to see the deformity on xray depending on the specific case. And then there is some thought that if the abnormality is so prevalent then why worry about it for breeding purposes because it is not clinically significant in all cases (…yet? although data is lacking because how many horses don’t perform or are euthanized for other reasons).
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Recently, I met 4 riders at a clinic who had to euthanize their young prospects, 8 and under, because of neurological problems. All were wondering WTF is going on and when will the breeders take this as a serious problem. Their horses’ breeders were not interested just like my mare’s breeder.
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On the event breeders FB page there is a discussion about ECVM and a comment about Dr Ros saying it is much more prevalent in WBs than previously understood. I’ve asked for more info. I’ll chime back if I get it. Always interesting to be a fly on the wall in these discussions, there’s so much depth of experience on those pages but not always freely shared.
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I have no experience with Warmbloods. However, I have noticed that in many of the still photos of horses at the WB stallion inspections have a rather extreme position of the fetlock, very low at the trot, which I am used to seeing only in GP jumpers landing from a big GP jump or horses in action when weighting their front or hind legs during certain maneuvers in their respective sports.
Is that sort of relatively extreme flexion and fetlock drop at the trot in a young horse really OK with breeders and buyers of expensive Dressage bred stock?
Asking because I have been curious about this for quite awhile now.
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I vetted two horses in December and passed on one specifically based on veterinary advice of too much fetlock drop at the walk.
So I asked the vet there doing the PPE, as well as my own vet here, about fetlock drop that I see at the trot in talented young horses, by comparison to the one they were advising me to pass on. And both told me that at the trot, it’s not an indication of possible future suspensory issues the way it is at the walk. It was the pastern dropping to almost horizontal at the walk that they both really called out.
When the same horse was standing still, the pasterns looked very upright and I even took a photo of each while I was there trying the horse, because they looked so upright compared to my current horse that it stood out to me. Yet in movement there was so much mobility that the vets were flagged by the amount of drop.
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Unfortunately, I was not aware of the problem until it happened to my young horse. I’ve always bought my youngsters based on their kuering results, 1st premium with overall scores above 80. I relied on the breeders and the judges to make the decisions which horses represented the best stock. How sad I didn’t realize long term soundness wasn’t a factor anymore. This buyer is voting no that extreme flexion and fetlock drop at the walk/trot is okay, now that I know it has deadly consequences.
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So sorry that happened to you. There’s something wrong with the whole kuering process it seems.
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Some of the ads I have noticed show an extremely upright neck position that gave me questions, specifically about the cervical and thoracic area.
I’ve also seen reports of malformed first and second ribs and have not been able to find images.
