Hey guys, it’s Krista with SaddleBox and in today’s video I’m going to be telling you a way you can detect soreness in your horse’s back and poll.
So again, this is just a way to detect soreness and maybe be able to pinpoint where it’s reoccurring and be able to really tell your vet or chiro where you’re seeing and feeling the soreness.
Okay, so I chose this horse because I figured he would be sore. So one thing you can do is just take your finger, the knuckle of your finger, and just kind of run it down. And see how he’s kind of twitching and his back fell a little bit? Now it’s normal for them to have a little bit of a reaction when you do go to do this, but how he’s falling like that, that’s not normal, so he’s very, very sore.
I’ll show you on another horse what a normal reaction would be. So basically, you could just go on the other side and do the exact same thing with the knuckle of your finger and just go down. So that tells me he’s more sore on this side than he is on this side.
So another common place horses get sore easily is their pull area, and this is because the halter and the bridal kind of pull and create tension there. Also the way they hold their heads when they go around and collection and whatnot, that can cause soreness as well.
So I’m just going to take my fingers like this and just kind of push and find that soreness. Yeah. So him putting his head down and trying to evade me and whatnot tells me he’s sore.
Okay, so this is a horse that’s not going to present a lot of soreness. She is six months pregnant and has been off the entire time, so she has not been ridden in quite a while.
So as you can see, she had a little bit of twitching, but that’s completely normal; no soreness here. And then for her poll, no soreness.
Alright y’all, I hope you enjoyed it and I’ll see you in the next one. Bye guys!