TRAINING THE PERUVIAN TRAIL HORSE

PART FOUR OF A SERIES by Julie Suhr

Author's note: This series was initiated with the intent of taking a young Peruvian Paso horse from the first early training days through the completion of an endurance ride, the ultimate test of the physical capabilities of a horse. Part one dealt with my background as a trail rider and my first experiences with the Peruvian Paso horse on the trail. Part two explained the methods I use from the birth of the horse to adulthood to train a trail horse My subject horse is Carolana, bred, raised and trained by me. Part three (August 1992 newsletter) discussed the early experiences with Carolana as I explored her potential as a future endurance horse. In this, part four, I have tried to assess Carolana in relation to the criteria used by the veterinarians in actual competition.

Carolana, with little effort and in my presence, produced a black colt in March 19, 1982. She was a good mother, and her young son was introduced to the trails early in life as he followed at her heels. He was weaned in September, and his mother was free of her maternal responsibilities. She was a full four years old and ready to start a more serious training program than the casual strolls of the past year and a half.

I still fault Carolana in two areas. Her hooves are small, and she is impossible to slim down. Although an extraordinarily easy keeper, she always looks as though she has just finished Thanksgiving dinner. I do not think she will ever have a trim waistline, and I have now decided she just has a big rib cage and I will stop concerning myself over it. (My veterinarian says that if I put her on a pelleted feed, I can slim her down by putting nourishment into her with less bulk. Because I think most equine vices (cribbing, weaving, etc.) are a result of boredom and frustration, I would prefer to have her munching hay three or four hours a day rather than provide extra time "on her hands" as a result of gobbling pellets in a short period.)

October of 1982 found us in definite training program, an hour and a half to two hours at least three times a week. I feel that daily exercise is less important than longer rides every other day, especially since she has a large enough area to self exercise on off days.

Carolana was now four years old and still a year away from meeting the minimum age requirement of five in order to enter an endurance ride. I was most anxious to see that she went through a long "legging-up" process. I wanted no bowed tendons or pulled suspensory ligaments to put her on a back burner while she healed. (I have never been a great believer in wrapping legs to prevent swelling. Keeping the horse moving is the best circulatory aid to carry the waste products of stress away.) I am proud of the fact that none of my Peruvian horses have any leg blemishes. *Marinera at near twenty-five years of age has absolutely clean legs. To the contrary, all of my Arabians except one have splints. Considering that the Peruvian horse has far more delicate legs and less bone than the average Arabian, I have concluded that the Peruvians have denser bone. I have always marveled at the spindly legs that carried the American buffalo at full speed across the plains states and our local deer population whose large bodies can be propelled over an eight foot fence by toothpick slim legs.

Along with the slow legging-up process, I began to monitor Carolana's pulse and respiration rates. At rest, a pulse rate of 32 to 40 beats per minute is about normal and respiration rats usually run 8 to 20 breaths per minute. The easiest way to get a pulse reading is with a stethoscope on the left side of the horse between the elbow and the girth area. A count taken for fifteen seconds and multiplied by four gives a fairly accurate reading of the per minute beat. If you don't have a stethoscope, it is a simple thing to pick up the heart beat in the same area with the back of the hand pressed firmly against the horse's side, or you can feel the pulse with your fingertips on the inside of the foreleg above the knee joint or on the bony edge of the jaw where a large artery passes over it. The respiration rate is even easier to measure. Watch the horse's flanks expand with each breath, or put your hand in front of his nose and feel the exhalation on it. In the latter case, you can't start your fifteen second count immediately as the horse likes to sniff your hand for the first few seconds, and the accuracy of the county is thrown off.

In training for endurance, you want to see quick recovery rates from high readings. As a guideline, most endurance rides require a recovery rate down to 64 on the pulse and 40 on respiration within ten to thirty minutes of entering the vet stop. This can vary according to the conditions of the day, and the criteria is usually set the night before by the head veterinarian who takes into account the difficulty of the ride and weather conditions. If your horse is going to successfully complete a ride, his body must be trained, tuned and conditioned so that he can meet the veterinarian parameters of the day, or he will be disqualified.

In addition to pulse and respiration rates, the veterinarian will rely heavily on other guidelines as to whether you and your horse will be allowed to continue in competition. He will test your mount's hydration by pinching the skin on the neck and seeing how quickly it snaps back to normal. If it takes more than a couple of seconds, the water content of the body cells has been depleted, and he will make a judgment as to whether the condition is serious or not. He will also check the horse's capillary refill by pressing on his gums with his thumb and observing how long the white spot from the pressure takes to return to a normal healthy pink. This will give an indication of the condition of the circulatory system. He will then check the mucous membranes by pulling the eyelid down and noting the color. If they are injected (excessively red) he knows the horse is being stressed pretty hard. He will listen to the gut sounds with his stethoscope to be sure the digestive and intestinal system has not slowed down dangerously or halted. An finally, if he likes what he sees, he will ask you to trot (or "paso" - as the case may be) the horse down the road for fifty or a hundred feet, and he will observe the soundness and attitude of the animal. If you pass all of these tests, you are on your way down the trail again, hopefully toward a successful completion of the ride. If the vet is not satisfied with what he eat sees, he will either give you a little extra time and then reexamine the horse or he will disqualify you on the spot. The latter is a real blow after the months and sometimes years of effort put into conditioning your horse...especially if you should be writing a series of magazine articles with the admirers of a breed waiting to see if you know what you are talking about!

Success in endurance riding frequently depends on some factors totally out of the control of the owner or the training program. Ideally, all horses, like all men, are created equal. However, it ain't necessarily so! Most true athletes are born. not made. Body conformation that keeps the animal sound under duress is all important. And there is a very important something called "heart". We can't tough it or see it or smell it or hear it, but it is there nonetheless. And in The final analysis, it is the animal with "heart", that animal that gives and gives of a body trained to accept the physical strains that comes out on top. His adrenaline must flow. His spirit of competition must prevail, and then you have yourself an endurance horse. The average. well-conditioned horse of sound body can complete an endurance ride. To win requires something extra? in much the same sense that while we can't all be Olympic winner Mark Spitz. we can with a little effort make it from one end of the pool to the other. With more effort and more training we can make it faster. But in most cases, all the effort and training in the world is not going to see you beating our United States gold medalist. He was a born athlete, just as some horses are.

To return to Carolana, I do not think she is a born athlete in the sense that I think *Marinera is. I think she is a horse of average ability who, with proper conditioning, will make it comfortably to the finish line of an endurance ride. My first efforts at monitoring her pulse and respiration rates were downright devastating. While her pulse recovery seemed consistent with her age and training, her respiration rate recoveries were disastrous. A typical respiration rate after an hour and a half of hill work would be around 120 to 140 breaths per minute. She was panting, but worse than that, after half an hour of rest, she was still panting at around 80 to l 00 times per minute. It was frequently a full hour before she returned to normal. A respiration rate higher than her pulse rate did not bode well for my long range plans for her.

I made a couple of inquiries to the owners of her full sisters, Calypso and Cantinela. Both owners reported quick recoveries after stress, and I was left with problem I did not know how to resolve. By January of 1983 with three to four months regular physical demands bringing about no improvement in her respiratory rate, I realized there was absolutely no way I could get this horse through a vet check. She could not possibly meet the rigid requirements. I took my problem to Matthew MacKay-Smith, medical editor of EQUUS Magazine and a leader in the field of sports medicine and endurance physiology. His answer, "You've got a panter on your hands, she'll probably never change. " He elaborated by saying, "Bring her to the east coast, and she'll do just fine. But she'll never make it on the west coast "

Because I have never had a panter before, a whole new dimension is being added to my experiences with endurance horses. The infant sport of endurance riding has just begun to recognize some of the different physiological needs of the horse under stress conditions. In our dry, western, summer climate, evaporation of sweat cools the horse quickly. In the east, high humidity retards evaporation, and the horse must cool himself by other means. He does this by taking short rapid breaths to expel body heat rather than the deeper, less frequent breaths that indicate oxygen deficiency. Why did I have a horse on the west coast behaving the way an east coast horse should?

"That's just her way," said Matthew, and added that when veterinarians learn to distinguish between oxygen debt and the need for cooling, our sport will take a giant step forward. Since she is not a heavy sweater, Carolana's cooling system turned inward, and she started panting to disperse body heat. Her external cooling system had let her down. In trying to solve the problem, I play cold water from the hose along the big blood vessels on the insides of her back legs, up and down her forelegs and on her neck. Water would have a beneficial cooling effect any place the blood stream ran close to the surface, as long as I avoided the back and loin muscles. This hastened the cooling process, but little good it would do me the day of a ride unless there was a stream near the vet stop. Everything had gone too smoothly to this point, and now I had to face up to the first real problem since her training had begun. I had pick the wrong horse for this article. I was downhearted and wondered how I could proceed with this series. I had said it would be a suspense story, but secretly I was sure Carolana could do it. Now I was not so sure!

Go to Part 5

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