> Just a thought, here...It seems that most folks remarking on shivering > horses are talking about Arabs. Could it be breed-related to a certain > extent, like the shivering in Chihuahuas? > > Heidi, Susan....your thoughts on this?
Yes, to a certain extent it is. It's sort of a part of an overall phenomenon that I've been seeing on the rise the past 30 years, as Arabian breeders have actually selected for a "nervy" sort of horse that is far departed from the desert Arab. So would add that it is part of something that is pretty common in the subset of the breed that has departed from the original. Were there horses like this before? Sure, otherwise one couldn't have selected these "wired" critters out to "breed them up" (which I put in quotes because I personally think it is breeding down, not up). But they were not the norm, because they were not suited to the work, and now that work is not the norm, but being bug-eyed and pop-veined to either fly around the ring like a kite on a string or to go around in some abnormal pumped-up version of a trot with the same out-of-your-mind expression IS the norm, these horses have been selected and purposefully bred to BE the norm. Fitting these horses back into a sport like endurance is like fitting a square peg into a round hole--I'm not saying it can't be done, if one is determined, but it is SO much easier to choose horses that are metabolically and mentally "designed" to do the task at hand. And those horses are out there--and no surprise that those are the horses that climb to the top of the sport. Heidi =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Ridecamp is a service of Endurance Net, http://www.endurance.net. Information, Policy, Disclaimer: http://www.endurance.net/Ridecamp =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
