Hoof Beats: Bits and pieces
I’d like to elaborate on a few topics, starting with Tom Bass.
Bill Downey, the author of “Tom Bass, Black Horseman,” was a journalist who owned and rode an American Saddlebred, but he wasn’t that knowledgeable about the breed. He wrote that Saddlebreds didn’t perform the slow-gait and the rack naturally — they had to be taught. This isn’t true. Unfortunately Downy wasn’t alone. Many horse show announcers said the same thing.
Today we know that there are several horse breeds with “natural gaits,” and they’re all genetic. A fox trot, the signature gait of the Missouri Fox Trotter requires the horse to walk in front and trot behind. American Saddlebreds and Standardbreds are the only two horse breeds I know about that trot and pace — or rack. All other breeds either trot or pace, but not both.
Animals that trot include cats and dogs, elk, cattle, the rhinoceros, and chipmunks. Only three pace — camels, dromedaries, and giraffes. A Saddlebred’s rack is sometimes called a “broken pace” because each foot hits the ground separately — the other three are in the air — in a steady one-two-three-four-beat rhythm. So: did young Tom Bass really teach the family mule to rack? Probably. Horses and mules can be taught any number of things, like how to canter sideways.
When Tom Bass observed that automobiles were the best thing that ever happened to horses, he meant that before cars, people depended on horses to get from here to there. Nowadays they’d drive a car, and many of them don’t treat it very well. They ignore maintenance guidelines, drive on bald tires, etc. And when their car stalls on a lonesome stretch of highway, not a gas station in sight, they get out, slam the door, and kick the tires in frustration.
Before cars, a lot of people treated horses the same way. As a result, many horses endured prolonged abuse. Anna Sewell did not write “Black Beauty” as a children’s book. She wrote it in protest, because so many horses used for transportation were badly mistreated, and she wanted the world to know about their plight. One Saddlebred trainer described the curb bit that Tom Bass developed as being “heavy.”
Today, smooth snaffle bits are considered milder than any curb. The same trainer prefers a curb with a wider, flatter port shaped to fit the horse’s tongue. If Tom’s bit was considered mild, that says a lot about the bits that other trainers and owners used.
In an earlier column, I wrote about the first horse I ever owned — an old gray mare named Spook I bought from a rent string in Bakersfield. I rode Western then, and the mare had to be ridden in a “mechanical hackamore,” meaning she didn’t have a bit in her mouth. Instead she had a leather-covered chain over her nose. She was fun to ride, but when I discovered she had a chronic sore on one of her back heels, I had to ask the ranch manager where I was boarding her to give her a shot once a day.
When the mare began kicking anybody who came near her, the manager suggested that I sell her at auction and buy myself a “nice horse.” So I did — Spook went to an auction and I bought Bachelor, my beautiful Appendix registered gelding. But if I had Spook today, I would ask my veterinarian to put her down. No horse deserves to die in a Mexican slaughterhouse. Many years later I bought — for $1 — Gunsmoke, an eight-year-old Quarter Horse stallion whose owner didn’t feed him. He was comfortable to ride, but I came to regret saving him because he was bone lazy. So I sold him to my farrier — for $1.
Front Range Horse Rescue was begun by a Colorado woman who bought a skin-and-bones horse at auction who could barely walk on hooves that hadn’t been trimmed in years. She knew he was too far gone to save, but she bought him anyway. Her vet put him down. It was in his memory that Hilary Wood founded the rescue, one of the highest-rated horse rescues in the country. In a similar situation, I would have bought the horse too — just to end his suffering.
Joan Fry is a lifelong horse lover and the author of “Backyard Horsekeeping: The Only Guide You’ Ever Need” (The Lyons Press, Revised Edition, 2007). She can be reached via email at joan@joanfry.com.
This article originally appeared on The Pueblo Chieftain: Hoof Beats: Bits and pieces
