Q. My horse is 15.2hh, and he loves to jump. I think he would rather die than be told he wasn’t allowed to jump. I don’t do a lot of jumping though – at the most, twice a week. If there’s a jump already set up when I’m riding, I’ll let him pop over once or twice, but as I said before, I only do any real jumping twice a week or less. I know he can jump five feet because he has done it before (not my choice, though). When he jumped the five-foot jump, he was almost at a standstill.
One of his back legs gets stiff now and then. What I mean by stiff is when you get out of bed first thing in the morning after a long good sleep, and you need to stretch before you get out of bed. His leg does this after being wet for a few hours when it’s cold outside. He’s not lame on it; he’s just stiff (when I take him out of his stall, he goes through a whole stretching routine – kinda cute to watch). He takes longer to warm up when he’s stiff. Most of the time I just hand-walk him to loosen him up, not ride. One time last summer, I noticed him doing something weird at a canter. I thought he was lame, so I stopped him and did a few tests to see if he was sore (from the ground and his back). At the walk and trot, he was fine, but the canter was a little different than normal. I asked a few people to watch him, and no one could see anything wrong even at the canter, except my trainer said he was playing in the field and might have pulled a muscle. I rubbed him down and gave him a few days off and rubbed him down two more times. After that he was fine. Now when I feel anything different, I cut the ride down and rub him down to make sure he’s fine. A friend told me to watch him because he might not want me to know that he’s lame cause he doesn’t want to let me down. Other than that one time, there hasn’t been a time where I could say he was lame, and I’m not sure if he was lame then.
So here’s my question. How high can I safely jump my horse without hurting his legs?
A. There are three issues at hand regarding your horse’s jumping potential: his innate ability to jump, his willingness and desire to jump, and his physical soundness for jumping. It sounds like he has plenty of innate ability. Any horse who can successfully clear five feet from a standstill possesses plenty of natural jump. You have stated that he loves jumping, so it would seem you have two of the three above issues in your favor.
The third issue – his physical soundness for jumping – is a concern for me. You have referred to what seems to be an intermittent, chronic stiffness in one of his hind legs. “Stiffness” can be interpreted in many different ways by many different folks. When someone tells me their horse’s leg is stiff, I interpret it to mean there is some degree of lameness in the leg. Since your horse’s leg stiffness has not been thoroughly examined and diagnosed by a veterinary equine specialist, there is simply no way to know how the substantial physical stress of jumping large fences would affect the leg. When one of my horses is in a state of questionable soundness, I don’t use him or her at all until the condition is resolved. I certainly wouldn’t dream of jumping any horse that was not completely sound. I’m sure this isn’t what you were hoping to read in my response, but if you intend to do any jumping with this animal, you owe it to him to have that leg stiffness properly diagnosed and evaluated for jumping soundness. Only an equine vet will be able to give you a knowledgeable prediction of this horse’s jumping future.
Animals in general are very much more stoical about their aches, pains, and injuries than humans are. Perhaps it’s a product of their strong survival instinct (much more likely than that your horse didn’t want to let you down), but you won’t often find a horse who babies every little injury or source of physical discomfort. That’s why it’s so easy to do permanent injury to a horse. What may be expressed as a slight stiffness or a canter that’s a little “off”, might be something considerably more serious. That’s also why it’s important to have these symptoms assessed by a veterinary equine specialist, especially in a horse you intend to jump regularly. I’m very glad you’re being so vigilant about your horse’s soundness and welfare. It’s obvious how much you care about him and want to do your best to keep him healthy, but it’s impossible to know exactly how to manage him properly without knowing what may be happening in that one hind leg. The fact that his stiffness is only in one leg is telling you there’s something not quite right in that leg.
Jumping is very stressful on leg structures, and it’s a generally accepted concept that any given horse has only so many jumps in his legs. The more you jump your horse, and the bigger the jumps are, the more quickly you’ll be likely to wear out his legs. I’m not trying to talk you out of jumping your horse. I just want you to understand that every jump you take with him brings you one jump closer to his retirement. You don’t want that to happen any sooner than it has to. A veterinary evaluation (making sure to check his stifle on the stiff side) will help you determine a safe level of exercise over fences.