03/07/2025
Så intressant 🥰😍🤩 Om man nu gillar att nörda ner sig i sånt här...
Follow-up to, ‘What do we see in this picture?’
One commenter said, nothing, and it’s kind of true.
Without full context, we can’t really be sure exactly what’s going on.
So maybe, more than anything, this is a lesson in not making assumptions about what we think we see.
I’m still not sure about the topline, if possibly a crop might’ve made it a little less objective.
But I will note, although a lot of people said that the lowered head in the bottom picture raised the back, what many did not see, is that the withers have sunken between the shoulder blades, as well, as evidenced by the white tape.
While lowering the head does traction on the dorsal processes at the withers and fan them out, giving some therapeutic benefit for horses who have kissing spine in that area, this traction can also block the lumbar and pelvis, so we might question if it would be better to ‘open the back’ by working back to front instead.
Becks Nairn probably had the most interesting comment…
“If we use the line of the DSPs of the sacrum as a guide to what the pelvis is doing, it’s in a severe posterior tilt and the tuber sacrals are seen as a prominent point because the head is high. The pelvis isn’t under traction by way of the nuchal ligaments and supraspinous because of head height. When the head is lowered traction is applied from the nuchal ligament to the supraspinous and onto the DSPs of thoracic spine, the effect on the pelvis is an anterior tilt that flattens the croup. This is the problem with simply lowering the head of a horse in movement, the pelvis is placed in a weak position because it’s not engaged. Not saying that lowering the head doesn’t sometime have its place in training very tense horses just that it’s not great long term for the pelvis. I’m not so worried about the sinking of the withers to be honest because this is what the thoracic sling is designed to do all day long grazing…..not to say the sling can’t have its own dysfunctions, it absolutely can. I get to see this action allot in dissections….the traction of the nuchal ligaments is insane, it is so strong it’s very hard to get the horses head to grazing height in a dissection setting.”
