Equine lordosis, more commonly called swayback is a
condition that looks just like it sounds. Instead of a nice straight
line from the the withers to the hip a horse with a swayed back has a
spine that dips towards the ground.
The average horse person looks at horse plagued with a swayed back and
automatically jumps to two conclusions. The fist the conclusion the
person jumps to is that the horse is a senior citizen, if not completely
past their useful years they are close to it. The second conclusion they
jump to is that they horse's spine was damaged through years of hard
riding with an improper conclusion.
I know from personal experience that these misconceptions are not always
true. I know this because I ride a young warm blood gelding, Spooner,
who has been plagued with a swayed spine since he was a yearling.
Although this gelding will be plagued with a swayback for the rest of
his life it has in know way affected his working career. He has started
a successful career as a show jumper and spends a great deal of his time
schooling complicated dressage movements. He is
athletic despite his condition and I've never come across a more willing
partner.
While he was an undergraduate at the University of Kentucky Dr. Patrick
Gallagher noticed something interesting about horses who had equine
lordosis. Humans and dogs that were diagnosed with lodosis were severely
disabled while horses with the same condition where able to be worked
and trained, something Spooner has proven to me time and time again.
It is estimated that only approximately one percent of the worlds horse
population is diagnosed with equine lordosis. Because so few horses
suffer from the condition very few researchers are willing to take the
time to study it, preferring to spend their time on things like founder
and colic. Dr. Gallagher became interested in the condition when he
noticed that his father's Saddlebreds seemed to run a higher risk of
developing equine lordosis then other breeds.
During his graduate studies Dr. Gallhager started to notice that there
was a direct correlation between a young horses skeletal structure and
the chances of them developing lordosis. Although the dip in the spine
was not normally obvious when the foal was born. As the foal grew and
developed the back started to sway. The inverted curve of the spine
normally stabilized when the foal finished growing. At six years old
Spooner's spine is just starting to stabilize (foals from Spooner's
family tend to grow taller until they are about six years old and
several of them don't completely broaden until they are eight).
The next thing Dr. Gallagher looked at was the foals pedigree and
genetic make-up. He noticed that certain family trees did have a greater
chance of developing lorodisis then others but was unable to isolate the
exact gene responsible.
Perhaps the most important thing Dr. Gallaghers research proved was
something I learned from Spooner. The back does not affect their work
habits. Swaybacked broodmares have no trouble carrying a foal to term,
while racehorses with lorodisis are not typically as fast as their
straight backed counterparts the average performance horse appears to be
unhampered by the inverted spine (Spooner has a hitch in one leg but
that could be an injury instead of his back).
Gallagher and I are in complete agreement that fitting a saddle to the
swaybacked horse takes a little thought. I have found that if I use my
simple cloth square-cut dressage blanket under a thick barrel racing
blanket my saddle not only fits well but I am also able to minimize the
amount I am jarred by Spooner's bouncing trot.
