Dennis Lane's Equine Profiling Card System for the Ridden Horse

[AZThunderPony]

Dennis, I heard trough the grape vine that you are coming to the US to give seminars or something to the affect. Will you be coming to Arizona? I would love to attend.

S

[DennisLane]

Hi Susan.

We will be there early May through to early June. Our schedule is extremely tight. We haven’t got any thing planed for Arizona. I am very interested in your problems & would like to see them first hand. If you P M me your address I will look at our schedule to see if we can squeeze it in if that is suitable.

Dennis

[AZThunderPony]

Hi Susan.

We will be there early May through to early June. Our schedule is extremely tight. We haven’t got any thing planed for Arizona. I am very interested in your problems & would like to see them first hand. If you P M me your address I will look at our schedule to see if we can squeeze it in if that is suitable.

Dennis

Will do! Thanks,

Susan

[daviD A Morris]

Hi Guys,

To anyone who may wish to contact us (us being Dave Morris, Dennis Lane & Hank Statham) between now and June 7th, we are in the USA & Cananda, and can be contacted at:

damorris@exemail.com.au

We are "on the road" so we will only be checking that email address every couple of days.

We are having one amazing trip, meeting lots of you guys, and looking forward to meeting more of you.

bye for now

dam

[Johanna]

new website for Dennis Lane and David Morris:

http://dennislane.com.au

Mail can also be sent to Dennis and David by the board via PM.

Johanna

[AZThunderPony]

Well Dennis, DaviD and Hank were here on Sunday last. We had about 3 hours of very enlightening discussions while we measured my three Spanish Mustangs. As was expected there weren't any new shapes among my horses, and the guys had the opportunity to measure two other SM's up in Wyoming as well with similar results. I did find Dennis's idea of where he would set the rigging to address the rigging issues I and others have experienced. All three men had some great input to give even with differing opinions. Bottom line the Equine Profiling Card System is very simple to use, and provides a wealth of information. There was a comment among themselves that I wasnt to certain I heard right. It was regarding a similarity of narrowness at some point along the back across the SM's they were able to measure. Guys when you get back could you share? I researched pedigrees and gait types of the horses logged so far and added this data to my own data log as if there is some similarity between shapes across a certain criteria it would be very interesting information to have. If not it certainly didnt hurt anything. The sad part as none of my horses were in proper shape or age, one was quite thin from being injured and raising a foal, another was 30 days away from foaling, and the other was an unbacked 3 years old very small stallion. The two that were measured up in Wyoming were saddle geldings from stouter built blooldines.

All in all the project of measuring SM's with Dennis' card system is taking off and I hope to have at least 100 horses measured. In a breed with a total registered number of 4000 (give or take a few) and a large number of them (approx 1000 give or take a 100) deceased foundation stock and another 500 or so under saddle age. Especially since our stock primarily trace to around 100-150 foundation horses. I still feel 100 measured SM's will give us a good baseline for our breed. There are a good many Colonial Spanish strains/bloodlines out there too that fall outside SMR stock who would add some interesting dimensions to the project. I have decided to run a parallel data log for those horses as well.

Right: Hank Statham holding The Spirit of Bear Paw (3 year old Spanish Mustang stallion)

Middle: DaviD Morris holding a profiling card

Left: Dennis Lane

Anyway, Thanks guys for a delightful visit and for sharing your knowledge and open minds. It was a monumental day for Spanish Mustangs. Hank, I cut down all the tumbleweed and sagebrush it being a fire hazard and all. lol

S

Celt's Baroque Spanish Mustangs

THE PONY EXPRESSION (see the Australian Saddle Makers on the blog)

Edited June 7, 2008 by AZThunderPony

[AZThunderPony]

Dennis or DaviD, are you guys working in Paypal for future sales of your card system?

;)S

[DennisLane]

We are in the process of adding an email address and Papal to the web site so people can order and pay for the cards straight from there. It may take another week or so to have it up and running. Until then those who require a set can contact David or myself and we will take care of it for you.

Dennis

[Margaux]

Okay.

Let's say that we have a perfect profile of the horse's back.

How is the tree constructed to take into account the fact that there is leather, fleece, and a blanket/pad in between the tree and the horse's back?

Obviously you can't just put 2" (or whatever your estimate is) straight down, it has to be normal (perpendicular) to the surface of the tree.

Who does that calculation?

How does is that taken into account?

Thanks in advance,

Margaux

[daviD A Morris]

Okay.

......Obviously you can't just put 2" (or whatever your estimate is) straight down, it has to be normal (perpendicular) to the surface of the tree.

......

Thanks in advance,

Margaux

Margaux,

You are absolutely right! It is not that simple, and then you have to make alowances for the horses movement and the back changes shape throughout the stride and diferent strides and activities etc. And that leads to such a wide variation in opinions on what, where and how those allowances for movement should be made. Ask 6 "saddle fitter's" for their opinions and you'll get 7 answers!

Even with a casting of the hors's back, you can not just make allowance for the padding (perpendicular to the surface) and then make a "negative" of it and use that as the bottom of the tree - it don't work! It is much like footwear for people. The last that shoes are made on is not the same shape as a casting of a person's foot.

OK what I've just said may sound very negative and you may now be thinking - "well, why bother with any of this". Well Dennis Lane and I (and many others) beleive that the first step toward reliably improving the comfort for the horse, is to be able to accurately describe the shape of the horse's back, and then communicate that shape to anyone else accross the world. The advantages of this particular system are that this communication can take place without having to send anything through the post. Another advantage is that the numbers designated to each of the shapes make for easy comparison of one horse to another, for example: anyone familar with the system (anyone who owns a set of the cards) imediately recognises that a horse who measures D8 or D9 is a very solid wide horse compared to say a D4, and an R12 has a lot of "front to rear" rock. A horse that measures R6 is very flat along the back. The Dennis Lane Cards are solely a method of measuring the horse's backs, recording those measurements and comunicating those measurements.

The ideal way for the treemakers to incorporate the Dennis Lane Cards into their communication system is to measure the horses that they have made those trees to idealy fit. Take for example Rod Nikkel would have access to a horse that his "full QH - 4-1/2 x 93" trees were designed to fit, and now he measures that horse with the DL cards and finds that that horse measures D7D8D8R9. Now Rod knows that that particular tree fits horses in that range. If he then recieves an order for a tree to fit a horse that is D9 with R12 rock, he knows that this horse is slightly wider/fatter and has more "front-to-rear" rock. Please do NOT quote these numbers/measurement I am just making them up as an example. Another treemaker's "full QH" fit may have been designed to fit a horses even wider. He may have had access to horses that measure D9. Both trees will still fit horses up in that D7 - D9 range, to varying degrees. While there are 9 different sizes in the cross-section measurements, we are definitely not advocating that there should be 9 different sizes of tree.

Hope the explanation helps

dam