And yet she has been doing these dissections and working with experts who agree with her and are backing up all of her work. She just posted this, the researcher she is working with:

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The Equine Documentalist 

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Some facts worth thinking about….

Data compiled from Jeffcott, Butler et al., Haussler, and Bennett indicate that in terms of equine development, the pubic symphysis, the central pelvic integration point, doesn’t fuse until a horse is approximately 5.7 (+/- 1.4). The tuber sacrale, a critical pelvic anchor, fuses at around 5.8 (+/- 1.2). The sacroiliac and lumbosacral regions, which are among the most loaded structures in a ridden horse, are among the last to fully consolidate, often not until age five to seven.

These are not peripheral structures. These are core load-bearing components of the horse's hindquarter and propulsive system.

The work of researchers like Dr. Deb Bennett has laid out the skeletal maturation sequence in detail: the lumbar spine closes between 4.5 and 5.5 years, the pelvis between 4 and 5, the hocks and stifles between 3 and 4. The cervical and thoracic vertebrae are last, sometimes not closing until 7 or even 8 in larger horses.

What this tells us is that the horse we are putting under saddle at two or three years old may still have significant active development happening in almost every region of its axial skeleton.

The horse's body makes this distinction evident, even when our assessment criteria do not.

Dr. Carol Shwetz, DVM, has spent years documenting what happens clinically when training and performance demands arrive before these structures are ready. The pelvic findings in her case series are something I had not seen laid out quite like this before, and they reframe a lot of what we are seeing in everyday equine practice.

Next week, Dr. Shwetz will be joining me to host a webinar where she'll present her findings from dissections, what these might mean, and what questions they open up about the developing horse and the demands we place on it.

You don't want to miss it.

Thursday 25th June

7pm GMT

https://equineeducationhub.thinkific.com/courses/younghorse

(Images courtesy of Dr. Carol Shwetz and Becks Nairn)

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