The Importance of Limb Conformation

“Why are horses designed so poorly?”

Many a horse owner who has been saddled with weeks of stall rest, repeat veterinary visits, or injury rehab has likely uttered this point, complaining about horses’ tendency to strain tendons, chip knees, and manifest various musculoskeletal afflictions. Sometimes we wish horses came with a foolproof plan for promoting optimal performance without injury.

Conformation standards provide the closest thing to such a blueprint; conventional wisdom holds that conformation faults—deviations from the ideal proportions of the horse’s limbs and body and relationship of these parts to one another—can increase risk of injury and decrease performance ability.

Yet, conformation ideals vary among breeds and disciplines, and there are countless anecdotes about horses that appeared to be designed by committee but excelled at the highest levels. These anomalies provoke the question: What do we actually know about equine conformation?

In this article, we will start from the ground up, looking at limb anatomy and conformation’s relationship to biomechanics, injury risk, and performance.

Andrew Parks, MA, VetMB, MRCVS, Dipl. ACVS, professor of equine lameness and head of the Large Animal Medicine department at the University of Georgia’s School of Veterinary Medicine, describes conformation as “the sum of all the pieces and parts, the size and shape, and the way they relate to form the whole,” a collection of attributes that is set once a horse is fully developed.

Source: Thehorse