What Do Zenyatta and Mister Ed Have in Common?

The San Francisco Giants look like they want to make quick work of the Texas Rangers and have a short 2010 World Series. If baseball season ends early, that will leave plenty of time on the news and in the papers for coverage of next week's Breeders Cup, and our favorite horse Zenyatta, who graced a billboard for the Dodgers in Los Angeles. She's based nearby at Hollywood Park.

The question was: What do Zenyatta and Mister Ed have in common?

As it turns out, they both seem to have registered themselves as baseball fans. LA Dodger fans, to be exact. And as the sun sets on the 2010 MLB season, we can have some fun with the baseball exploits of Zenyatta and Ed in the midst of the World Series.

Champion Thoroughbred Zenyatta is the queen of good news, whether she's at home at Hollywood Park or mixing with the media at Churchill Downs, site of next weekend's Breeders Cup. The stories about her personality and her antics make even the most hardened racetrackers chuckle. And next week she'll be the queen of this blog, as she prepares for the Breeders Cup Classic and what we all hope will be a repeat win and her 20th consecutive lifetime victory--with never a defeat!

Zenyatta is the best thing to happen to racing since...well, for a very long time, let's just leave it at that. But how does racing take advantage of this great horse so that some of the affection for her might possibly benefit the rest of the sport? Can Zenyatta bring people back to the track? Can some of those warm and fuzzy feelings for Zenyatta transfer to other horses running in this year's Breeders Cup? Couldn't Quality Road or Blind Luck or Blame or Goldikova or even Workforce be portrayed as likable as Zenyatta?

If there was any doubt that that warm and fuzzy Zenyatta feeling was going mainstream, look back in time no further than back in July when National Public Radio aired a special interview about the supermare. And whom did they choose to interview? None other than Laura Hillenbrand, the author of the bestselling book Seabiscuit,another champion racehorse who captured imaginations and won hearts.

Take a few minutes to listen to Laura's interview and then post a link to this blog story on your Facebook page and forward this to your friends, especially if they aren't already racing fans. I bet Zenyatta will convert them.

Zenyatta is not the first horse to promote the Dodgers. Back in 1963, Mister Ed showed Leo Durocher, Sandy Koufax, Moose Skowron, Willie Davis and Johnny Roseboro how it's done. Imagine how Zenyatta could round those bases! But knowing her running style, she'd definitely win it for the team on the last out of the ninth inning...by hitting a home run!

© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing; Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. Please, no use without permission. You only need to ask. This blog may be read online at the blog page, checked via RSS feed, or received via a digest-type email (requires signup in box at top right of blog page). To subscribe to Hoofcare and Lameness (the journal), please visit the main site, www.hoofcare.com, where many educational products and media related to equine lameness and hoof science can be found. Questions or problems with this blog? Send email to blog@hoofcare.com.

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Picture Power: Hock Lock in Dressage Drama at Euro Championships

by Fran Jurga | 27 August 2009 | Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog

Whether you call it the plantar plant, the hock lock or the tarsal torque, this photograph is a keeper. Events send me lots of competition photos, all very nice, but this one shows a horse working very, very hard. Double-click on this photo for an enlarged view to see the detail of this movement. You can almost feel the horse holding himself in place on the footing. The FEI rule book stipulates that the right hind would stay in place throughout the movement, although video analysis has shown that horses don't or perhaps can't actually do that. (FEI Photo by Kit Houghton)

The horse is Mistral Hojris, a Danish-bred ridden by Britain's Laura Bechtolsheimer today in the Grand Prix Special individual competition at the Alltech FEI European Championships at Windsor Castle in England. Records fell there today as not one but two Dutch riders--Gold medalist Adelinde Cornilessen and silver medalist Edward Gal--broke records for high scores in that event. And Laura and Mistral won the bronze medal for Great Britain, as she finished ahead of Olympic gold medalist Anky Van Grunsven, also of The Netherlands.

The announcer reportedly said when Laura came down the centerline to halt, "You can breathe again." And he didn't just mean Laura, he meant the entire British audience. Chef d'equipe Will Connell even blogged that the farrier had tears in his eyes watching the ride.

If you are one of those who still thinks that dressage is boring, consider this statement from Ground Jury President Stephen Clarke who said "I've judged a few championships in my time but I've never seen sport like this. This was the greatest moment in dressage history - we've never seen riders performing at such a level before and now the sport is wide open - anyone can win. I want to applaud the courage of the riders who rode so brilliantly under pressure - this was an outstanding day," he added. "At times the hair was standing up on the back of my neck! At odd moments, we were saying to each other '10's are just not enough' to reward what we have seen."

Interviewed after the event, silver medalist Edward Gal commented, when asked if there is now a new Dutch school of dressage, "It’s about how we ride. It feels good and it looks good, but it’s not just about training. We just keep the horses happy. You need to adapt your riding to your horse and not the other way around."

The musical freestyle is the next event at the championships, and will be held on Saturday.

This photo in a way reminds me of the nice photo from California of champion Thoroughbred mare Zenyatta bursting from the starting gate on hind legs acting like power thrusters. It was on the blog a few weeks ago. I like photos that show athletic horses fully engaged, working hard; they are something magnificent to behold. Capturing it in a split second with a camera is very difficult.

If you enlarge the photo you will also see that the grooming regimen for Mistral Hojris didn't include close-shaving his muzzle, although it may have been tidied up a bit.


© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing. No use without permission. You only need to ask.

Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. This blog may be read online at the blog page, checked via RSS feed, or received via a digest-type email (requires signup in box at top right of blog page).

To subscribe to Hoofcare and Lameness (the journal), please visit the main site, www.hoofcare.com, where many educational products and media related to equine lameness and hoof science can be found.

Questions or problems with this blog? Send email to blog@hoofcare.com.

Poem for a Summer's Night: The Two-Headed Calf

I'm not sure that I've ever put a poem on this blog before but this little verse has been on my mind these recent hot summer nights. It's one of my favorites, a gift by chance when listening to the radio one day. It sounded much longer when read aloud.

The poet is Laura Gilpin, who is no longer with us. She was a nurse and an advocate for humanizing hospital care for the terminally ill and she wrote a lot about animals, people, life and death in a way that seems very authentic to me.

So here you have one of my favorite poems, an ode to a summer's night and all its infinite possibilities and tragedies, depending on how you look at things:

The Two-Headed Calf

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass.
And as he stares into the sky, there
are twice as many stars as usual.

--Laura Gilpin
from her anthology The Hocus Pocus of the Universe

Foot Balance And Lameness Thesis Wins British Award

A study of foot balance and lameness in riding school horses has won the Royal Agricultural Society of England‟s "Eqvalan Duo Equine Thesis of the Year Award‟, which celebrated its tenth anniversary this year. The award is sponsored by Merial, manufacturers of the Eqvalan equine wormer.

On Friday, before a panel of academic and horse industry authorities, Laura Corbin from Warwickshire College in England reported on her research on riding school horses and described how she developed an objective system to evaluate foot balance. She found that horses with chronic foot conditions often had poor scores for foot balance and proposed that maintaining good foot balance could reduce lameness and provide long term economic benefits.

Laura is currently undertaking a studentship with the Roslin Institute and is at the University of Edinburgh in preparation for her PhD.

Her winning thesis “Foot Balance and Lameness in Riding School Horses”, was selected from research theses submitted by universities in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Laura competed against four other finalists in a presentation of her study which the judges described as “fascinating and extremely useful information for the industry”.

Second prize winner was Charlotte White of Nottingham Trent University for her dissertation: "An investigation into the occlusal secondary dentine thickness in horses of different ages".

From the abstract for Corbin's thesis is this general summary:

"Inappropriate foot balance has been implicated as a causative factor in many instances of equine lameness. In this study, the static foot balance of 81 horses at two riding schools was evaluated in order to assess foot balance in relation to lameness.

"An objective system was used to assign a foot imbalance score to each horse based on the occurrence of the following foot abnormalities: sheared heels, underrun heels, contracted heels, broken hoof pastern axis, mismatched hoof angles and small feet, as assessed using specific measurements of the foot.

"The mean foot imbalance scores were 2.9 (± 1.0) for horses at Riding School A and 2.9 (± 1.2) for horses at Riding School B. (Minimum score = 0; maximum score = 6).

"Horses with chronic foot conditions were found to have significantly worse foot balance with respect to the foot abnormalities identified in this study (as indicated by a higher foot imbalance score) than those without.

"At one of the riding schools, horses that had been lame within the last year had significantly worse foot balance than other horses in the population.

"The results suggested that poor foot balance in riding school horses may contribute to the occurrence of lameness and the development of chronic foot conditions. Maintaining appropriate foot balance in riding school horses may therefore reduce the incidence of lameness and chronic foot conditions and could provide long-term economic benefits.

"Further investigations incorporating a greater number riding schools are necessary to confirm the results of this study; prospective studies would be of particular value."

Note: the abstract is a little vague about defining what a chronic foot condition is or how severe or longlasting the lameness conditions were. Hopefully the full paper will disclose a lot more about the methods and presumptions of this study. Congratulations to Laura for bringing the preventive value of good hoof balance to the attention of the public. Warwickshire College is home to one of Britain's leading farrier college programs.

© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing. No use without permission. Permissions for use elsewhere are most often easily arranged.

Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. This blog may be read online at the blog page, checked via RSS feed, or received via a digest-type email (requires signup in box at top right of blog page).

To subscribe to Hoofcare and Lameness (the journal), please visit the main site, www.hoofcare.com, where many educational products and media related to equine lameness and hoof science can be found.

Questions or problems with this blog? Send email to blog@hoofcare.com.