Penn Vet’s Elizabeth Davidson loves a good horse mystery. She and her team of equine Sports Medicine experts at New Bolton Center have solved many cases of “just not right” horses, athletic animals who aren’t performing well but don’t have any obvious clinical complaints.
“These ‘mystery horses’ look fine,” says Davidson, sports medicine service chief and associate professor of sports medicine. “They eat and drink. They run around a pasture. In their stalls, they act normal. But when you ask them to do their jobs, for whatever reason they don’t do them properly or at all. Owners or trainers come to us to sort out why.”
Like all great detectives, Davidson and her New Bolton Center peers use their highly-developed powers of observation to find clues. And assessing the horse’s gait while it’s being ridden is one of the tools they use to crack each case.
“We start by taking a detailed history and conducting a physical examination,” says Davidson. “Because the most common problem for an athletic horse that isn’t doing its job is some sort of musculoskeletal abnormality, we then go through a traditional gait assessment without a rider. Sometimes the problem is clear. But often these horses don’t have an obvious lameness. What we see when we look at them without a rider is different than when we look at them with a rider.”
After this preliminary investigation of the horse’s gait, which usually happens outside, the evaluation team moves inside to the Ilona English Equine Performance and Evaluation Facility (EPEF).
Solving the “just not right” horse puzzle is much easier since Penn Vet opened the world-class EPEF nearly six years ago.
Read more at the Penn Vet Press Room.
