Conformation

lialls

lialls

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Hi im new on here and was just wondering if anyone can help me, Im doing an assignment for college about conformation of horses.

Ok to the point now: How would you explain a well made/put together horse?? I know what one is but I just can't explain it lol.

Can anyone help?

Cheers
 
Ooh I did my dissertation about conformation, would help you out but you should really do the work for yourself! Have a look on Google Scholar or Science Direct and search for conformation of horses and you will get loads of research. Also there is a book called The Equine Athlete, think its Sarah Pilliner and it has a whole section about conformation. She looked at measuring points on the skeleton, and suggested a horse with perfect conformation is perfectly proportioned. Will try and find a picture for you!
 
i think i'd add: the horse should look correct and balanced as it stands, all limbs straight and true, feet in perfect pairs and exactly set on correctly, and well balanced on every plane, joints of correct size and shape, and in perfect pairs, correct musculature comes into it a bit, all angles correct (e.g. angle of neck onto shoulder, angle of rump, angle of pastern etc). correct lengths - e.g. length of pasterns, length of cannon bones, length of back, length of neck (this varies a bit according to type of horse obv). the overall picture should be of a horse that stands four-square and fits into a box, not a parallelogram for e.g.!)
hope that helps a bit.
 
Some of the horses on Fugly Horse of the Day look some what deformed. And I thort my mare had poor conformation........

Thanks for all the help everyone!
 
Ive just had a quick look and cant find my work I did from the Pilliner book so have just done this quickly, not accurate AT ALL so please dont use it as an example, but if you can manage to get the book its a really interesting exercise to do on your own horse. According to Pilliner the lines should all be the same length, as you can see from mine his legs are way too short! You can also do the same thing with joint angles. As you can tell Im a bit of a geek when it comes to conformation, let me know how you get on with it!
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Thanks for that. Yes I think I'll hav to get the book, will be interesting to do it on my mare lol.

Love you horse btw!! Hes very cute!
 
Another thing to remember with conformation is that it doesn' matter how well the horse it put together, if it hasn't got a good brain, you will never get anywhere.

And if it has a good brain and heart, even if it's conformation is pretty poor, it can still do a really good job.

Look at some of the top performance horses on the circuit at the mo - if you judged them on conformation alone, half of them would go in the reject bin!
 
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