Talk:Equine conformation

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[edit] Some suggestions

Thanks to the authors for this marvellous article!

Just to improve it a little:

  • add some sources (I guess, you have many!)
  • consider posting pictures into Commons (I'd like to use lots of them!) and using thumbnails into the articleAlex brollo 07:44, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Comment on "goose rump"

In the section on conformation of the hind quarters, it is stated that goose rump is (i) common only in draught breeds, (ii) impedes engagement of the hind quarters, and (iii) means the horse is best suited to slow activities such as harness or trail riding.

Actually, goose rumps are also fairly common in warmbloods, since they include draft parentage.

Engagement of the hind quarters is impeded if the distance from point of croup to point of buttock is short, whether a horse is goose-rumped or not. If this distance is adequate, then being goose-rumped does not impede engagement of the quarters.

Being goose-rumped is considered valuable in some jumping breeds, both show-jumpers and eventers (which also must gallop), provided the distance from croup to buttock is adequate. For example, the ideal conformation of the Irish Draught includes a goose-rump: "croup to buttocks to be long and sloping, not short and rounded or flat topped;" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Draught), and this breed is used for show-jumping and eventing. Goose rumps are also valued in the Irish Sports Horse which is progeny of an Irish Draught and a Thoroughbred. The Irish Sports Horse studbook dominates the highest levels of eventing, holding top position for the last 9 years (studbook rankings can be found at http://www.wbfsh.com).

The chapter on conformation in the Manual of Horsemanship (Pony Club UK, 2005, ISBN:0954886313) also notes that goose rumps are associated with jumping ability.

-John.

[edit] Follow-up to comment on "goose rump"

The section on goose-rumped conformation has been expanded & split into goose-rumped and steep-rumped sections. The ambiguity in the goose-rumped term with respect to steepness & length of the rump slope has also been noted.

[edit] Article Sandbox

I think an initial section on "form to function" needs to be added here, right after the introduction. I am importing some material form the horses in warfare article that addresses this issue, and then will edit it around to better fit this article. Feel free to dive into this sandbox and add useful information. And beware: My gaze is turning to this article, bold edits may be imminent! (grin) Montanabw 23:52, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] PROPOSED Form to function SECTION sandbox

A fundamental principle of equine conformation is "form to function." Therefore, the type of horse used for various work depends upon the task at hand. There is a trade-off between speed and weight. Adding weight reduces maximum speed, as is seen today when handicapping modern race horses. Conversely, a too-light horse may be physically unable to cope with tasks involving weight or raw muscle power. For example, a horse used in team roping has to be heavier than the steer that it must hold at the end of a rope.

The ideal horse for one task may be wholly unsuitable for another. To take an extreme example, a Shire draft horse is not able to reach or sustain great gallopint speeds, and a Thoroughbred race horse is ill-suited for pulling a plow.

Horses vary in size, both height and weight, depending on the type of work, the weight a horse needs to carry or pull, and any distances traveled. The average horse can carry up to approximately 25% of its body weight.[1][2] Weight carried affects both speed and endurance.

Horses used for pulling vehicles also vary in size, and again trade off speed for weight and power. A Standardbred horse used for harness racing is faster but can pull less weight than a Belgian horse used to pull a heavy plow at slow speeds. While all horses can pull more than they can carry, the weight horses can pull varies widely, depending on the build of the horse, the type of vehicle, whether a vehicle rolls on wheels or is simply drug, whether it is pulled on a good road or in rough terrain, and so on.[3] In practical terms, a modern heavy draft horse weighing about 2000 lb can pull somewhere between 1.5 tons and 9 tons, depending on conditions[3][4][5] For example, a team of two modern draft horses can pull 4,000 lb in weight-pull competitions, dragging a unwheeled weighted sled on level dirt for a short distance[6][7] On the other hand, horses pulling a wheeled vehicle on a paved road can pull between three to eight times their weight.[8]

Horses also have different ways their muscles are distributed and different length and diameter of bone and varying angles in their skeleton, depending on the jobs they are asked to do. Light, "hotblood" horses such as the Arabian or Thoroughbred, excel in activities requiring speed, endurance and agility. Medium-weight "warmblooded" horses, such as the variousWarmblood or Iberian horse breeds, plus many stock horse breeds, such as the American Quarter Horse, are generally quite agile and have powerful hindquarters with great sprinting and turning ability, though they trade off powerful musculature by sacrificing the raw speed and endurance of a lighter horse. Large, heavy draft horses have the raw muscle power to pull great weight, though they may sacrifice some agility and must sacrifice speed.

However, some comformation traits (such as good withers) are almost universally desired, and certain conformation flaws (such as calf knees) are universally avoided.

[edit] Advertisement on page

Hello, I'm not really good at this whole Wikipedia thing. I don't know anything about horses (but I'm learning a lot! thank you!)... But..

"Calf-Kneed/Back at the Knee [29][30]"

Link 29, up there lead to what looked to be some sort of promotion for a website of some sort--a today.com--complete with an overly narrow human waist with a measuring tape.

This is obviously not what was intended--I'd edit things myself to fix it, but have no clue how to, and may just muck things up.

So I'm doing the next best thing, and letting you wiki-savvy horse people take care of it. :)

Oh, there are a number of 'page not found' links as well, though I sadly did not note those while I was browsing.

68.220.228.219 21:59, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] more sections

I think the article should be divided into more sections to make it easier to make minor changes and read but i thought id ask. and although this is a stupid question is it barrel or barre im pretty sure its barrel Dog jumper100 03:36, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

Yes, barrel, the rib cage area, yes. See horse anatomy if you need to cross-check. This conformation article is, frankly, a mess, and a mess so big I haven't had the guts to tackle it yet, myself. It probably needs a reorganization from top to bottom. You can try adding some more headers and see if it makes things better or worse. The horse anatomy articles also are all over the place; there are separate articles about some parts, such as the withers or horse hoof, but not much about others...and nothing is very well cross-linked. There is much to do, and only a few of us to do it. If you can organize existing content, give it a shot. Montanabw 04:18, 30 May 2007 (UTC)


[edit] Dished Faces

Statement: The dished face is a feature common to the Arabian horse. Statement: A roman nose is a feature common to the Clydesdale. Statement: The features of the Arabian horse were in place before humans began artificially selecting them. Statement: The features of the Clydesdale were in place before humans began artificially selecting them. Therefore, does it not seem reasonable that the dished face of the Arabian horse exists as a result of the proto-Arabian horse being modeled to suit a desert climate? Does it not also seem reasonable that the distinctively un-dished face of the Clydesdale exists for the same reasons, but for a cold, moist climate?

If the basic tenets of animal physiology hold up for horses, as they most certainly do, then the differences in facial structure between breeds with a long association with cold/damp vs. arid climates have little, if anything, to do with the type of work they are doing and much more to do with heat and water loss. Firstly, I do not think it's unreasonable to suppose that the small cross-sectional area of the typically-Arabian face (which may be or may have been narrow without necessarily being "dished") allows for better dissipation of heat, especially in the face, where blood vessels are close to the surface. By the same logic, it is also not unreasonable to think that the large, "lymphatic" head of the Clydesdale and similar cold-climate horses allows for better retention of heat. Secondly, I have never heard before that sinus size had anything to do with the amount of air it was possible to take in; only that sinus size is related to the animal's ability to warm air before sending it to the lungs, or dump heat into exhaled air. Food for thought. Countercanter 23:37, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

This whole article has a need for a lot of work. What it needs most, however, is citation material. My thinking is that the whole darn thing needs some simplification and a rewrite. I don't disagree that certain conformation features were dictated by climate long before domestication of the horse, and of course, form to function. My take is that if you see some things to rewrite and improve, please do so, but be careful to be NPOV and avoid too much breed discussion if at all possible (just to avoid edit wars, if for no other reason). This article has long been on my "gotta get around to improving this one" list, but it's a daunting project. You want to take it on, I doubt anyone will complain about good quality work! Montanabw(talk) 04:03, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] How to structure this article?

I was thinking that it might (1) be more digestible, (2) be more accurate to separate "universal" faults from "traits." This of course begs the question of how one decides what a "universal" fault is. I think a good measuring stick would be a trait that unequivocally impairs the horse's health. From what I can see, that includes:

  • overshot/undershot jaw
  • crooked legs
  • faulty hooves

It seems to me that these things ought to come first in the article. Certainly before the head! I've never ridden a horse's head.

I also think statements like "The ideal neck is about 1/3 horse's length" are not especially helpful. Says who? Why? What's this magic number from? Is it just because it "looks nice," kind of like the reason I don't wear horizontal stripes? Perhaps, instead, we might structure the neck like so:

Neck The neck of the horse comprises 7 cervical vertebrae. The 1st cervical vertebra attaches to the back of the skull and the 7th attaches to the 1st dorsal vertebra just anterior to the scapula. The windpipe and esophagus run the ventral side of the neck, under the jugular groove. The neck of the horse contains all the muscles that allow the horse to raise, lower, and swing the head side to side.

Length (I might use Przewalski-Pferd Porträt.jpg with the caption "The neck of this wild horse species would be considered short by most horse enthusiasts") I don't think I'd quantify what a "short" or "long" neck was. The whole horizontal stripes deal is a trick of visual harmony; so is neck length. It looks harmonious. And nobody needs to be told that the pieces of the horse need to fit together. So I might write something like this:

A horse with a neck that is too short in comparison with his legs may not be able to comfortably reach the ground to graze. In these cases, the horse will splay its forelegs to reach down, and usually will develop a preference for which leg goes forward. Over time, this preference may translate to unevenness in the muscles and even bones of the legs, affecting hoof wear.

The walk, canter and jump of a horse rely on the horse's ability to telescope the neck out and down as a counter-weight. A neck that does not have sufficient mass relative to its body may detract from the quality of the walk, canter, and jump.

Conversely, a horse with a neck that is too long may be difficult to get "round." Instead of working through the bridle, long-necked horses may simply arch the neck and come behind the bit. An excessively long neck may increase the horse's tendency to carry its weight on the forehand. The mass of the head is further from the body, and inertia may make it harder for long-necked horses to spin and stop quickly. Like a suspension bridge, the muscles and ligaments in an excessively long neck may be strained. Roaring frequently occurs in long-necked horses, possibly resulting from injury to a long laryngeal nerve. [[1]] for the bit on roaring.

I might also go on to say that in breeds and types where the jump and canter are less important, necks may be shorter. Do cutting/reining horses tend to have shorter necks? I made an inference on the long necked vs. spin/stop bit; just seems like the laws of physics to me, but I'll have to find a source.

Thoughts, anybody? I really don't approve of all the non-sequitor in horse conformation, and I'd like to see certain parts of conformation represented for what they are: it's pleasing to the eye and makes the horse marketable, which has no more rational "oomph" behind it than wearing a black dress. Countercanter (talk) 16:03, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Hmm. Your idea of breaking out what are universal flaws from breed traits desirable in one breed but not another has some merit, but it also could start edit wars if not handled very carefully. I am strongly of the opinion that there is sort of a universal base of what good conformation is, with deviations from that base that reflect form to function. (No, in fact, cutting and reining horses do NOT necessarily have "short"necks, in fact, it's a flaw, though their neck may not be as long as that of some warmbloods or saddlebreds-- (a powerfully muscled rear end with those bulky fast twitch muscles, however, is a must)-- actually, if you take the high-action trotting breeds, long necks tend to be favored, at least with critters such as saddlebreds). To me, all good horses will have correct leg conformation, solid musculature, proper shoulder and hip angles (with some variations-- a jumper has a slightly different ideal shoulder angle than does a draft horse or, in the opposite direction, a flat-racing racehorse, for example) and so on. We can pull the basics from almost any general text. What I would do is pull together several good reference sources and see if there is a common scheme to the content layout (some start with the head just because it's the first thing people see...head to toe, so to speak. I have about six books on conformation sitting in my library, including that nice little three volume set by Deb Bennett that is quite nicely done, but whenever I get to dragging them out to source this article, I just get discouraged because the thing is such a mess. This article really needs to just be wiped and started over. Perhaps we need to create a "sandbox" off of this talk page (an archive of sorts would work) to play around with stuff. Montanabw(talk) 22:42, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Sources

Here is a list of sources. Please add to it!

Evans, K. E., McGreevy, P.D. "Conformation of the Equine Skull: A Morphometric Study." Anatomia, Histologia, Embryologia: Journal of Veterinary Medicine Series C; Aug2006, Vol. 35 Issue 4, p221-227. Offers standardized procedures for skull measurements of living and deceased horses. Compares the head structure of Arabians, Thoroughbreds, and Standardbreds.

Crevier-Denoix, N. et al. "Comparison of the Comformation of 20 International Level and the 20 Low Level Jumping Horses Using a 3-D Video Morphometric Measurement Method." Anatomia, Histologia, Embryologia: Journal of Veterinary Medicine Series C; Dec2005 Supplement 1, Vol. 34, p13-13. The one-page summary was in a supplement to the journal itself, and only states that statistically significant differences were found in 132 conformation parameters. If anyone can find the results of this study, that'd be fabulous! The facilities associated with the study are: UMR INRA-ENVA de Biomécanique et Pathologie Locomotrice du Cheval (BPLC) - Ecole Nationale Vétérinaire d'Alfort - 7, avenue du Général de Gaulle 94704 Maisons-Alfort cedex, France Association Nationale des éleveurs de chevaux de race Selle Français, 7 rue d'Athènes 75009 Paris, France UMR 181 INRA-ENVT, Ecole Vétérinaire de Toulouse, France Génétique Quantitative, Centre INRA de Castanet-Tolosan, Toulouse, France Département Hippique, Centre d'Enseignement Zootechnique de Rambouillet, France

Dutto, Darren J., Hoyt, Donald F., Cogger, Edward A., Wickler, Steven J. "Ground reaction forces in horses trotting up an incline and on the level over a range of speeds." Journal of Experimental Biology; Sep2004, Vol. 207 Issue 20, p3507-3514. Key statement: "On the level, over the range of speeds tested, total force was consistently distributed between the limbs as 57% forelimb and 43% hindlimb, similar to the weight distribution of the horses during static weight tests. On the incline, the force distribution during locomotion shifted to 52% forelimb and 48% hindlimb."

Wilson, Alan M., McGuigan, M. Polly, Su, Anne, van den Bogert, Anton J. "Horses damp the spring in their step." Nature; 12/20/2001-12/27/2001, Vol. 414 Issue 6866, p895. I actually need to read this one thoroughly, but from my basic understanding, it states that a horse's gallop is made more efficient by storing energy in the spring-like leg structures. However, galloping makes the leg structures vibrate at a frequency that can seriously damage hard structures.

"Effect of toe and heel elevation on calculated tendon strains in the horse and the influence of the proximal interphalangeal joint." By: Lawson, Siân E. M.; Chateau, Henry; Pourcelot, Philippe; Denoix, Jean-Marie; Crevier-Denoix, Nathalie. Journal of Anatomy, May2007, Vol. 210 Issue 5, p583-591.

Radiographic Assessment of Equine Interphalangeal Joints Asymmetry: Articular Impact of Asymmetric Bearings (Part II). By: Caudron, I.; Grulke, S.; Farnir, F.; Aupaix, R.; Serteyn, D.. Journal of Veterinary Medicine Series A, Sept98, Vol. 45 Issue 6/7, p327. "This study is part of a work to develop a radiographic method that defines objectively the individual conformation of an equine digit and its appropriate trimming. The authors used isolated distal limbs fastened on a rotation support with variable inclinations to study the influence of induced asymmetric bearings on various angles measured from specific radiographs. The digit responded to asymmetric bearings by 1. deformation of the hoof; 2. rotation of the phalanges; and 3. joint asymmetry or local articular space narrowing. The two last situations occured mainly in the distal interphalangeal joint. Some of the angles mentioned above allow quantification of interphalangeal articular asymmetry, angular deformity and rotational deviation of a distal limb."

[[2]] Sport Horse Conformation And The Breeder, by Dr. Robert Baird.

[[3]] Specialization for Riding Horses. Secondary source, but the KWPN/Dutch do a great deal of research on how to identify and breed horses with certain talents. Essentially it details the natural way in which jumper-breeding and dressage-breeding drifted apart, and how over successive generations, the disparities between certain traits in either type have gotten larger. This suggests that the ideal jumper and ideal dressage horse look and move differently. The most substantial conformation differences were: jumpers tend to have a balanced, powerful and completely rhythmical canter. This is probably because the jump is mechanically like the canter step. A horse that can change the size of his canter stride easily, remaining balanced, can do the same over fences. That trait is called "scope." The other big differences were that dressage horses had higher-set necks and more sloping shoulders. The first quality makes self-carriage easier, and the second contributes to foreleg mechanics. Jumpers tended to have a shorter croup and more obtuse angle in the hock. Taken together, we might say that jumpers tend to have a straighter hind leg. This I did not find entirely surprising, either. We find straighter hind legs in Thoroughbreds; it contributes to the gallop by making the limb longer and increasing the stride. To jump, the horse must also place the hind leg far underneath the body. And, as I mentioned, the jump is mechanically like the gallop.

[[4]] This website, while perhaps not a suitable source for an encyclopedia article, is well-reasoned and informative.

I also have tons of articles about the biomechanics of jumping. I haven't had time to read them all. There is a ton of research going on, especially now that we have computer models. Countercanter (talk) 01:02, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

What we need to do is to properly footnote whatever we use. My contributions are more general works:
  • Edwards, Gladys Brown Anatomy and Conformation of the Horse
  • Bennett, Deb. Principles of Conformation Analysis vols I-III
  • Engler, Sherrie. Horse Conformation: Structure, Soundness, and Performance Equine Research, 2004
  • Harris, Susan E. The USPC Guide to Conformation, Movement and Soundness

What I am wondering is if what has to happen is to make the conformation article a general overview, with breakout sections to, for example, a separate article on the biomechanics of jumping. My thinking is that I know a lot of kids read these articles, so it makes sense to me to make the lead article sort of simple and general, and then spin off additional articles for people who want more detail.

Also, if you haven't found it yet, check out Horse anatomy and particularly its spin off, Skeletal system of the horse, we don't want to overlap too much and want to be sure to cross-link when needed. (I REALLY LIKE the idea of a separate article on biomechanics of movement in the horse, it could also be cross-linked from horse gait)

All for now. Montanabw(talk) 06:40, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Study shows that a wide throatlatch is not correlated with performance ability

[5] Source. Will edit soon, or someone else can have at it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Countercanter (talk • contribs) 17:56, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Interesting. This whole article is such a disaster, but if individual sections can be cleaned up, that's a start. I say "gopher" it! Montanabw(talk) 03:58, 10 March 2008 (UTC)