By LITA DOVE
Canyon Oak Farm,
Moorpark, CA
"No foot, no horse". This is especially true for performance horses today. These athletes are asked to jump higher, run faster, move better than ever before. Horses cost more to buy, cost a lot more to train ... and it becomes a much more expensive proposition when their performance life is shortened because of leg injury or foot injury.
An injury due to concussion and/or bad footing is one of the most common reasons for laying up a valuable horse.
Knowing this and doing something about it are two different things.
At the 1984 Olympics, I had a chance to talk with some of the world's top riders and horsepeople.
I asked each and every one of them about footing.
Two of the world's best dressage riders, Dr. Reiner Klimka (Individual Gold Medalist that year) and Christine Stuckelberger (Individual Gold, 1976 Bromont Olympics) both said they were using rubber shreds over sand. Both felt it was, by far, the best footing they had tried.
When I returned home, I spent six weeks tracking down a source for these magical rubber shreds. I finally found a company, Atlos Rubber, Inc. in Los Angeles, they sell it under the name Equestri-Flex. They said yes, they had what I wanted. I showed a sample bag to Sandy Pflueger, my instructor and a member of the 1984 Olympic Dressage Team (as well as a top international eventing competitor). Sandy lives and works part of the time in Europe and knows about rubber footing. She looked at the Equestri-Flex and said yes, it would work wonderfully well.
So we ordered enough rubber to cover the arena surface to about an inch or so. We spread it out...and suddenly it was like riding on a huge gymnast's mat. It wasn't so much that the rubber made the horses bounce, and seem to have more spring, but the surface was so consistent and so even, that the horses quickly realized they did not have to worry about holes, deep or hard spots, or anything else.
So they step out proudly and with maximum effort.
My friends came over and after tentative first rides, started inventing reasons for coming by to use the arena. When rainy season hit, we had more friends than ever...because the arena dried out and drained so quickly.
We've been through three winters, several Santa Ana winds (up to 65 mph once or twice!), three Southern California summers...and the arena is like a thermal blanket: cooler in summer, drier in winter. I don't miss training days because my arena is unusable and horses who seem 'ouchy' in other arenas go perfectly fine in mine.
I guess Christine Stuckelberger was correct when she said her horses were "totally spoiled" by their wonderful arena. But after she said that and smiled, she grew more serious. She noted that, as she asked her horses for maximum effort, the least she could do was to make sure the arena had as good a surface as she could provide. For her, this meant rubber mixed with sand. Great horses she said, trained to a high level, are not easy -- or cheap -- to replace.
My horses at home are not world class (yet!) but at least they are not an accident waiting to happen, working on the kind of footing that is sure to cause problems that are also sure to crop up at the worst possible moment -- before show or when being offered for sale.
Every once in a while, totaling the expense of the ring, I think the cost seems more compared to other arenas. But then a friend calls and tells me about veterinarian bills, about having to retire a top quality horse because something went wrong with one leg or another. No foot, no horse.
Then the cost of rubber shreds seems very affordable indeed.
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