08/10/2023
This is crazy! Make sure your saddle fitter checks out your saddle thoroughly.
Hey, I've shown this sort of thing before and here we go again… another saddle, another nail. Check the undersides of your saddles, if not every single time you put them on a horse, then darned near...
This is the underside of a student's high-end, well-known make of saddle, meant for working cowhorse and ranch horse type competitions. It was probably a good $6000 or more, new, so not meant to be a piece of junk.
This caught my hand after she'd asked me to check the saddle fit. Not only was there way too much 'rock' for her flatter-backed young stock horse—the flip side of her deep ‘pocket’ performance seat—this 1" common nail had worked its way out through the sheepskin. These are put in during the build, to hold the skirts in place while the saddlemaker works on the saddle. They're meant to be pulled out but... stuff happens.
We've found such nails on custom builds, too, so I'm not pointing fingers at just one well-known company. I'm just saying that if we're putting something like a saddle on a horse's back, we'll want to keep an eye on what's really going on underneath us. Worse, many of these commercial western saddle brands only offer a choice of two tree widths for all horses, so right off the bat we're probably getting into trouble.
This saddle also had the skirts put on about 1" lower on one side than the other; we can only wonder whether the all-important rigging was put in evenly, as well? No wonder our horses sometimes have trouble with leads and bend.
Our saddles matter. The colour and shape of the skirts, or the style of the conchos, does not. They're the all-important interface between ourselves and the horse. Coming up, we'll take a closer look at blankets and pads, mainly for the western crowd...
Out of sight should not be out of mind.
