11/02/2022
“Bridle Lameness”
“Bridle lameness” was a word that I had never been confronted with in my youth, maybe because I grew up in Germany, maybe because none of the horses where I rode had cause for it (even though I doubt that). In any case, the word suddenly appeared in my vocabulary when in 2008 I bought my first horse here in the UK but no one was able to explain to me in a coherent way what it actually was.
That is, until one day in December 2009 it was explained to me by my horse.
My riding instructor at the time decided to try a different bit on my mare halfway through a session in which she rode her. My mare was used to a snaffle and the bit my instructor introduced consisted of a very thin straight rod with some lever action. I could see my mare immediately going tight in the neck and left shoulder to avoid contact with the bit and within a minute or so she showed left forelimb lameness. At the time I didn’t have the wherewithal to tell my instructor to swap the bit back and she rode the other half hour on a slightly limpy horse with the (forced) head carriage that she had intended to achieve by changing the bit.
This was an eye opener for me and I suddenly realised that I had just been shown a live demonstration of bridle lameness.
The next day I rode my mare in her usual bit on the beach and I suppose I must have been unlucky as she ended up with a tendon injury. And yes, in her left forelimb. Coincidence? I’m not so sure. My suspicion is that the tightness she had developed in her left neck/ shoulder/ forelimb the previous day had left her predisposed for a significant flexor tendon injury.
Why am I bringing this story from 2009 up again now? Because an incident from 2015 came up in conversation with a friend recently and some information that I did not have until a few days ago made me feel that I want to mention this subject.
In 2015 I had a riding lesson on Vienna with someone who advertised himself as a grand prix rider. I rode her in the first half hour of the lesson and he decided that I was riding Vienna too incompetently and that he could do it better, so I was asked to hop off and he hopped on. The first issue was that he must have weighed about 20 kg more than I did and Vienna had never carried anyone heavier than me before. In fact, she had never been ridden by anyone else than me up to that point. I could see she was struggling the moment he got on her. As she was not going forward as he thought she should, he spent half an hour whipping her. She took the beating without going forward significantly more than with me because she couldn’t.
What I learned recently is that there was another person present who had told him that she thought that Vienna was lame, to which he had apparently replied that he thought that she was bridle lame. And presumably in his opinion bridle lameness was not a legitimate reason for a horse to not go forward or to limp, hence the half hour whipping to overcome the lameness imagined by the horse. *
I propose here to change the term “bridle lameness” to “tack lameness” with an addition of maybe even “rider lameness” as in my opinion based on my observation anything that is causing a horse discomfort or hinders its free movement can cause resistance, tension and will lead to an irregular gait that can’t be beaten out of the horse. (Maybe if you beat hard enough the horse will eventually decide that the pain from the whipping is worse than the pain that is causing the lameness and it will choose the path of the least resistance and the rider has “won”, but at what cost??)
My other horse Heidi used to suffer from “tack lameness” because her saddle used to bang against the caudal edges of her shoulder blades with each forward movement of the forelimbs in the swing phase (at that point the scapula rotates backwards). So she shortened her strides in order to reduce the caudal rotation of her scapulae that led to the banging and as a result she looked and felt lame in both front limbs under saddle while she strode out freely riderless on the lunge.
This scenario in my opinion occurred because of her slightly strange conformation but this “tack lameness” was overcome by using a saddle that has a carbon tree which twists in itself in concert with her strides. A treeless saddle may have done the trick as well but as she always seemed to throw saddles to the right, I didn’t think that treeless was a suitable option for this horse.
However, after a jumping lesson she was “saddle lame” again the next day, I think because the tree banged against her very rotated scapulae during landing with my added weight behind it. Subsequently me riding her ba****ck to remove the offending saddle tree/ scapula interface allowed us to continue with the ridden work without any problems and I’ve been mostly riding her with a ba****ck pad since then.
I would like to urge everyone to treat “bridle lameness” with the respect and consideration it deserves as horses generally don’t make up pain and lameness. While they may learn certain behaviours by association I think it is unlikely that they attempt to predict human responses to their lameness behaviour. Try to be aware which piece of tack the lameness may come from and eliminate through trial and error by changing potential causative factors.
*Just to complete the story of the riding lesson: I was unable to ride her for 3 days after that session due to back related lameness that I treated. 2 months later Vienna ended up having bilateral plantar nerve neurectomies. Her Suspensory ligaments in both her hindlimbs had neurogenic pain without the tissues being significantly damaged. Because both hindlimbs were affected she lacked impulsion without visibly limping. She was also diagnosed with kissing spines and her surgery was performed the following year, after she had recovered from the leg surgeries.
