The number of young performance horses sustaining significant injuries, or being retired from competition, is on the rise. As horses are pushed at earlier ages to jump higher, or collect more tightly, their bodies are sustaining significant and sometimes career-ending injuries. Some horses require frequent joint injections and medications in order to continue their training.

Many of these horses are demonstrating signs of pain that are ignored, because they do not fall into the category of an obvious traditional, head-nodding lameness. Others simply endure imbalanced riders, pinching saddles, damaging training, and strong bits until they suffer torn tendons and ligaments, spinal changes, and behavioural transformations. Many of these horses require lengthy and expensive rehabilitations, while some are merely sold, retired, slaughtered or humanely destroyed.

An integrative veterinarian, Dr. Joanna Robson has done much work looking into pain, and non-traditional lameness. Dr Robson states "Too many horses are blamed for being bad, or intentionally trying to anger their owners. We must learn to take a step back and listen to what the horse is trying to tell us. Most behavioural and training issues are merely the horse's expression of pain."

What are a few of these signs of pain and non-traditional lameness? Examples include: trouble with striking off on a particular canter lead, leaning on the bit, bucking under saddle, head tossing, difficulty with bending or lateral work, balking at hills, biting when saddled or girthed, uneven muscle development or atrophy, choppy strides, a hollow or stiff back and much more. Sadly the rider's answer to these problems is frequently harsher bits, martingales or draw reins, expensive saddle pads, unnecessary joint injections, a new trainer, or selling their horse.

To try and go some way in helping us understand these problems and how to more accurately identify pain in equines, Dr Robson has produced a book and DVD - "Recognizing the horse in pain ... and what you can do about it!" Both the book and DVD are designed to educate horsemen and woman about basic anatomy, saddle fitting, behavioural and training issues resulting from equine pain, hoof balance, stretching exercises, training equipment, understanding alternative medicine modalities and treatment options and much more.

Dr Robson's DVD will be available from www.abouttack.com very soon! Please contact us for more information, or if you would like to pre-order.

Extract from Dr Joanna Robson's DVD