“I don’t know how much you know about horses, but…”
Well, pretty much everything, I think to myself, but come on, maybe I’ll learn something – and with that thought in mind, I just got the best course in Kyrgyz understanding of horses
“Just look at a horse and you can see by its muscular structure what kind of life it has had. There are two kinds of muscles. Movement and compensatory. It’s a new horse science, it’s called biomechanics. I’ve been following it on the internet. When the horse moves normally, just right, it builds up those movement muscles. They grow and the horse gets a nice trained look. But when people start overloading the horse and he can’t tighten those movement muscles anymore, he starts using those compensatory muscles to walk normally too. And then it shows in the horse. If he uses those compensatory muscles for a few years for a different purpose than they are intended for, then you can see that he is using those muscles wrong. And it’s not visually pretty, it just makes the horse look like he’s been overworked.”
“Wow. So you buy a horse at the market just by the way it looks? That you can tell all that on him?”
“No, I still ride them. I’m just testing. In case he has any bad habits. A lot of horses around here raise their heads and just don’t stop. The locals reinforce it. They hold them in place with a bit and whip them on the ass to make them go. Then it makes the horses grow a deer neck. How stressed it is. And they learn to ignore the bit.”
“And why do the locals do that?”
“It keeps the horses alert. So he’s ready to shoot forward at any time.”
“I see.”
Just kokboru training. Different region, different training.
