Patrick Keane Dressage Saddle from Advanced Saddle Fit

It’s simply incredible to us Americans (or at least to me) how truly “cottage” much of the saddle industry is in the UK, where all of our saddles are made.  It’s extremely human-intensive in comparison to some of the big French, Italian, and other European saddle makers who turn out extraordinarily consistent saddles one after the next, because they are produced almost entirely by automation.

For example, a high-end French or Italian saddle typically comes out of very modern, high-tech, fully automated manufacturing plant.  Human hands do very little until the last finishing bits, when a person actually hammers in the enamel nail head.  The labor component of this sort of modern Continental saddle production is a fraction what it is in the traditional saddleries of England.  In these up-to-date European plants, even the wool is precision-blown into the panels by an air compressor (though some use foam panels exclusively).  There is little or no variation in these saddles, which are consistently lovely in their way.

There is, of course, a reason that we have not embraced this type of saddle up to this point, which is that horses are far from uniform.  Designing and producing saddles meant to suit “the mean” (whatever that would be in horses or humans) is a legitimate business objective, but whether this best serves the interests of individual horses, who definitely don’t conform to a mean in reality, is another matter.

Some days the surgical exactitude of this production method seems like my definition of heaven compared to the relative quaintness of the British saddle makers, some of whose premises could be stage sets for the very darkest side of Dickens – or Kafka.  On the other hand, we greatly appreciate being able to have a say in what trees, panels, and fit features we want in our saddles, based on what we have learned from experience over many years fitting saddles in the field to thousands of horses.

There are certain trees we have found to be very horse-friendly and versatile to fit.  We want to use these trees when and where appropriate, and we want the panels done the way we think works best to address a particular need.  Sometimes, I want to be able to say to the human who is making the saddle, “For this saddle, I would like you to put the stitch line up 1 cm, and cut the panel 4 cm deeper into the sweat flap.”  It would be difficult to do this anywhere but Walsall, because it requires the sort of individual customization in production that can only be achieved where handcrafting is not only feasible, it’s the norm.  Patrick Keane’s saddles, for example, have between 40 and 50 hours of hand work in each one, compared to the industrialized European producers whose saddle production methods involve only a small human component.

Even the mid-range British saddles that are closer to being mass-produced than Patrick’s saddles are still made on a bench by a skilled person using hand tools, though not necessarily from beginning to end by the same person.  With most of the larger Walsall manufacturers, all of the component parts of the saddle are largely standardized, and they arrive on the bench in a plastic bin for the bench saddler to assemble them by hand.  This does limit our capacity to get customization of trees and patterns, though we can usually choose from a short list of standard variations.

Not all Walsall saddle makers, even at the small, cottage-craft level, are willing to make saddles any way other than the way they are accustomed to doing them.  If they are willing, they still may not truly grasp why we ask for certain features to be done a specific way, and they sometimes seem to think that we are asking for pointless variations or exceptions that make no sense.  This is because — shocking revelation here — saddlery is an industrial sector that is not very closely connected to the real world of horses.

There are certainly exceptions, but contrary to what consumers reasonably assume, even first-rate saddle makers don’t commonly have extensive, in-depth experience fitting their saddles to horses.  Most saddle makers spend the vast majority of their time making saddles.  They may tear themselves away from their bench from time to time to see some horses under saddle, but it is not particularly common for a saddle maker to be an experienced horseman, nor is it common for a saddle maker to do a great deal of field research on the efficacy of his product for a broad population of horses.

Saddle fitters like us generally have much more real world experience of a particular saddle than the person who made it, though quite often we lack sufficient technical knowledge of the design and manufacturing process to be as effective as we should be in suggesting improvements.  This may not be the most apt analogy, but the highly skilled technician who makes medical devices is probably not as adept at the actual installation as an experienced surgeon who sinks his hands into human flesh day in and day out.  But I wouldn’t necessarily trust the surgeon to try his hand at making one of those precision devices either.

Some days we rejoice in our good fortune that we have found some saddlers in Walsall who are attuned to our real-world needs and willing to listen.  At other moments in time, this has felt like the worst of both worlds: in some instances, we might be denied the option to get variations like a lined panel or an altered stitch line or a particular tree that isn’t one of their standards.  But neither do we necessarily get the precision uniformity of automated European manufacture.  In our worst-case experience with some of the highly promoted brands with wide name recognition, we have suffered the vicissitudes of human-intensive production without enjoying the benefits of flexibility and responsiveness that this should facilitate.

Admittedly, we sometimes we try variations on a theme that don’t work as well as we think they are going to.  It takes time and experience to know how well a particular fit solution works over time in the real world of horses. It is hard to know for certain whether a particular saddle or some particular feature of a saddle will perform to our expectations until we have acquired some experience with it over time.  As in most of life, the pattern of progress is often two steps forward and one step back.

For me, the durability of a good fit solution is critical.  A durable solution is one that is tolerant of changes in the shape of the horse’s back in motion, and tolerant of some change in the horse’s condition over time.  A durable solution is one that many similar horses appear to thrive in over time.  Of course no one can guarantee that a saddle that fits well today will necessarily fit just as well next year (especially if the horse gets fat), but what I can say for sure is that the better the fit on day one, the greater the odds it will still be working well on day one thousand.

Clearly there are trade-offs in different approaches to saddle design and production.  I don’t think there is enough information in the public domain for consumers to make optimal decisions about what is the best value for their money.  I will close this with my recurring refrain that I believe the way forward is in educating ourselves about what we are getting for our money when we buy a saddle.  What do you think?

High maintenance? Moi?

Several times a week, at least, I get inquiries about whether it would be possible to “re-fit” a saddle that was originally purchased for a different horse.

I never know how to answer this, except to say that there is nothing black and white about fitting saddles, and to offer the observation that good fit occurs along a continuum.  The hardest thing to know is where a particular horse needs to be on that continuum for the fit to be “good enough.”

What I can tell you is that it is far easier to find fault in the fit of a saddle than it is to be certain what saddle fit solution will work well.  Where there is some deficiency in fit – which, let’s face it, is more common than not — it’s not always obvious whether the shortcoming is significant to a particular horse.

Some horses seem to do fine for a long time in saddles that, by my standards, are a complete nightmare of poor fit.  Other horses decline to even try to cope if every detail of the saddle and the pad and the bridle and the bit and the girth and the color of the bling on their browband isn’t precisely to their liking.  That would be my bay princess, pictured here.

There are a number of problems that complicate the situation for the owner of a new horse, including the fact that you probably don’t know the horse very well yet; you can’t always be certain whether the underlying cause of a problem is physical, behavioral, or attributable to the fit of the saddle; and in many cases, you probably already have a saddle that you are hoping to make work rather than having the luxury of a range of choices to experiment with and choose from.

Despite the fact that many riders have been indoctrinated in the belief that a saddle can be “re-fit”  by re-flocking its panels, this is only true to the extent that the tree is an excellent fit for the horse to begin with, and the panels were purpose-built to allow for significant adjustment.  Honestly, if the tree is a sketchy fit — or if the horse just doesn’t like the tree, even though it appears to be an okay fit — whatever adjustment you make to the flocking is probably not going to improve the situation significantly.

In reality, the weight of the rider is primarily carried by the bearing structure and not by the unstructured pillows that cushion it.  Moreover, the efficacy of that cushioning is quite limited at the best of times.  Ironically, where the greatest force is exerted by the dynamic weight of the rider — which is generally around the neck of the tree and the stirrup bars — the thickness of the padding between living tissue and tree is minimal.

If you are lucky enough to have a saddle with a suitable tree and a suitable panel with sufficient internal volume, you can often fine-tune the balance of the saddle to good effect by adjusting the density or distribution of the flocking.  Skillful flocking can work well to refine a decent fit, but it cannot compensate for fundamental fit flaws.

It is absolutely vital to consider that sometimes a horse’s discomfort has an underlying cause not  attributable to the fit of the saddle.  There can be any number of underlying physical issues such as ulcers, Lyme disease, sore hocks, bad teeth, spinal impingement, metabolic disorders, or even the stress of travel and a new environment that can make a horse uncomfortable and back sore, though his saddle be perfectly crafted for him by angels.

Inside the gray area, the question you must ask yourself is whether it makes sense to put money into your saddle speculatively, in the hope that it will improve the horse’s liking for the saddle.  Sometimes it makes sense to try a shock absorbent pad like a Prolite or Thinline to address particular balance issues or to try to protect the horse’s back from a less-than-perfect fit.  An upcoming post will address the issue of how and why pads can, at times, be lifesavers.

I personally have a protocol for what saddles I will or won’t flock, or strip flock (which means to completely replace the old wool in the panel with new wool).   Periodic, routine maintenance of wool-flocked panels is recommended even on a well-fitting saddle.  I have had clients almost swoon with pleasure when their well-loved saddle has been freshly flocked and rebalanced.  In situations where the horse has done well for years in a particular saddle, but the panels have been fossilized by long hard use, it may make sense to strip flock the saddle and refurbish the panels with brand new wool.  Just bear in mind before sinking lots of money into altering an existing saddle that putting plush leather seats in your Gremlin will not make it Bentley.

Pattern recognition is critical to a solid, enduring saddle fit solution, but sourcing the right saddle can be frustrating, as many saddles are designed primarily for rider appeal rather than optimal horse fit.

Dear readers, has anyone read Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell’s well-researched and entertaining book about ultra-high achievers?  The premise is that hidden patterns are often at work like an invisible hand, tipping the odds for exceptional success in quite a non-random way.

Did you know, for example, that nearly all the best ice hockey players are born in January, February, or March?  Apparently even very talented players who happen to be born in November or December may as well not even bother learning to skate, nor to kick a ball for that matter.  It turns out that soccer players with early-in-the-year birthdays are also greatly over-represented in the top ranks of that sport.  But this isn’t true in every sport.  So. . . what’s up with that?

Essentially Gladwell is asking some hard why questions about what accounts for highly exceptional achievement.   Yeah, yeah, talent-shmalent.  How does that explain the fact that all of the world’s top software entrepreneurs were born within a year or two of one another?  Coincidence?  No way!  What kind of premise for a bestselling book would that be?

So, I ask myself, what are the really hard why questions about saddles, and what makes so many people perfectly willing to accept hearsay or marketing claims about saddles at face value?  Don’t we owe it to our horses (and ourselves) to ask hard questions that will help us to develop an understanding of what optimal saddle fit even means?

I can’t say I know precisely why, but I feel that I can say for a fact that certain shapes of tree are more tolerant to fit than others — not only in that they fit a wider variety of horses within a body type, but also because they can tolerate some degree of change in the horse and still work well.  In effect, these are trees that are very horse-shaped for certain populations of horses.  Some types of saddles have almost no margin of error and don’t fit many horses very well; these are ones I believe were primarily designed around rider feel and rider fashion – or at least what a manufacturer decided was going to appeal and sell well to riders.

Comfortable shoes are absolutely vital to my personal quality of life.  To be comfortable, my shoes must have sufficient fit tolerance that they still feel good on my feet even after I have been standing on concrete for 10 hours without a break, or at the end of an overnight flight when my feet have swelled like a pair of giant slugs. Saddles should fit horses like my shoes fit my feet; but how do we even know what is optimal for the horse, and how do we get there from here?

I firmly believe that the way forward lies in recognizing underlying patterns in the way that certain types of saddles or certain features of saddles function best over the long term for particular types of horses.  This may sound perfectly obvious, but it isn’t how the industry is organized.  To look at saddle design and saddle fitting in this light requires more of a paradigm shift than it might seem, and real shifts in paradigm always encounter strong resistance.

Ultimately the players who drive commercial success in the saddle biz are riders, not horses, and judging from the commercial success of a lot of top saddle brands, pandering to rider preferences rather than designing around horse fit is arguably a winning formula, especially if riders refrain from asking awkward why questions. The truth is that many riders are viscerally uncomfortable — whether they know it or not — with the concept that saddles should be designed from the horse up to the rider rather than the other way round.

There are, of course, many exceptions, but on the whole I don’t think that riders are under very much pressure to challenge their own personal beliefs about how saddles should fit and function.  Nor are many riders highly motivated to shift or compromise their personal preferences for how fabulous their ideal saddle should feel.

That’s a shame, because one of the patterns that has emerged in my experience is that a decent rider can almost always genuinely learn to love almost any saddle that really fits his or her horse.

Fashion trends in saddles and conventional “rules” of saddle fitting are of little use to this hard-working fellow.

I spent a bit of time today doing a quick survey of equestrian bulletin boards where people ask for advice or express their opinions about various issues around saddles and evaluating saddle fit.

On some bulletin boards, there are a few dominant posters who function as the consulting experts on the subject of saddle fitting in the on-going conversation.   Setting aside the question of how anyone doing continuous field work with horses finds the time to expound on every saddle fitting question that pops up in these threads, what is more baffling is that quite often other people who make no pretense of extensive knowledge or training offer sure-fire “facts” and advice about saddles to others, most of which are based on very limited and very personal experience or on hearsay about certain saddles or particular saddle fitting solutions.

How much real utility do people derive from the advice offered in these threads?  I have absolutely no idea, but since people keep asking and answering these posts for years on end, they must derive something gratifying from the “information” being passed around.  As far as I can tell, a foundation in fact or even in logic is entirely optional, so there must be some other source of gratification that brings the same people back again and again.

It’s pretty clear why people in the saddle selling business, including me, would put themselves out there as authorities on these matters.  But once again, I have to ask myself, why are people so willing to believe what they are told about saddles without demanding or even expecting any demonstrable basis in fact?

As I have confessed again and again, there was a time when I first started in this business that I was extraordinarily willing to suspend disbelief and swallow whole the information I was fed by a manufacturer and a distributor about the unequivocal superiority of their brand of saddles.   Critical thinking about saddles was not deemed necessary to success as a saddle fitter/salesman, and in fact would have been considered downright counter-productive.  The important thing for both salesman and consumer is to believe hard enough that what you want to be true about your chosen product really is true.  Facts are subject to interpretation; belief is key.

I have no choice but to fall back on belief to do my job every day, if for no other reason than the fact that there is so little science to backstop what I believe to be best practice.  Some years ago, when I asked my mentor in Scotland, Kay Hastilow, to explain to me exactly how she knows why a particular saddle fit solution does or doesn’t work for certain horses, her curt and somewhat exasperated response was, “I know from thirty years’ experience.”

I was sort of crushed by that answer at the time, but having a few more years’ experience of my own since then, I realize now that what Kay was really saying is that extensive experience teaches you to see patterns.  If nothing else, years of trial and error yield a great deal of data on what has worked or hasn’t worked well over time for many horses, especially if one has kept careful records of what was tried.  From this, we learn to sort patterns.  For me at least — failing access to hard science (and don’t hold your breath waiting for that) – recognizable patterns of success and failure are a more useful basis for saddle fitting than opinions.

I keep asking myself whether I shouldn’t join in the fun on these bulletin boards by adding my own two cents instead of hanging out here in my mostly solitary writing world.   That said, every time I read through one of these threads, I can’t help but think of a crude but descriptive urban slang term that describes another sort of circular group activity.  But hey. . . shifting paradigms ain’t easy, but someone’s gotta do it.

That is absolutely not the case with the tree inside a saddle.   As saddle fitters, we really do need to understand how a particular tree looks to understand how it functions inside a saddle.  Different types of horses require substantially different shapes of tree to attain a good, even distribution of weight over the bearing structure of the saddle.

A good start toward that objective is to be able to have examples of bare trees that are in the saddles we fit, so we can study their form and geometry.  Trust me, dear reader – this is a no-brainer.  So why is it so hard to convince people that to understand the fit of a saddle, they probably need to know more about it than what is visible on the outside?

Some of the claims that are made by saddle companies – I’m thinking particularly about trees that are touted as “adjustable” to any horse – are just wildly implausible.   For the most part, horse people are pretty smart, pretty accomplished.  So why don’t they ask harder questions when it comes to buying a saddle? Why don’t customers face down saddle companies with demands that they back their claims about their products with hard, visible evidence?    Could it be that there are inconvenient truths about saddles that consumers don’t really want to know?

I’m no stranger to tasks that are resistant to research, and, in my previous career as a Foreign Service Officer, I acquired considerable experience with folks throughout the world who were completely impervious to logic.  But when it comes to the saddle biz, I don’t think I exaggerate much in describing an entire industry that leans that way, from manufacturers to consumers, including the legions of us that scuttle between them.

From my point of view, I have an obligation to use my skill and experience as a saddle fitter to be an advocate for the horse, and to explain in some depth my underlying assumptions about how I think saddles should fit horses.  But I have moments of profound doubt that this approach, where the starting place is to get the best fit for the horse, is the easiest way to win friends and influence people. Frankly, while almost all riders who contact me for help finding the right saddle tell me that an optimal fit for their horse is their first priority, quite often that’s not entirely true.

Riders – your needs are not unimportant to me, but please consider that you have the luxury of choice; your horse doesn’t.   The good news is that in my experience, almost without exception, if you surrender yourself to a good saddle that’s decent for you and a great fit for your horse, I can all but promise that before long just such a saddle will become the leather love of your life.

These are some of the primary “fact-based” problems we run into all the time:

1. Since riders have credit cards and horses don’t, rider appeal nearly always trumps horse fit in designing saddles commercially. (If you doubt this, take a look at how saddles are described in marketing material, which is overwhelmingly biased toward how well the saddle will suit the rider.)
2. Very few riders (and not all saddle fitters) have sufficient knowledge of saddle design and technology to evaluate comparative fit considerations accurately. In this, they get little or no help from manufacturers.
3. Not every saddle maker/designer works with hundreds of horses in the field every year as we do.  Many of them see only a small handful of horses, and rarely do they systematically follow the progress of individual horses to see how well particular saddle solutions work (or don’t work) for different types of horses over time.

The most deep-down, almost primal assumption among riders is that somewhere in the universe there is a saddle that the rider will absolutely love.  Moreover, this “one true saddle” will be just as brilliant a fit for her horse as it is for her. The corollary to this assumption is that saddles can be customized or custom-made to meet the most exact requirements of the rider without compromising on optimal fit for the horse.  In fact, this is exactly what a “custom saddle” is supposed to achieve (according to this assumption).

In reality, whether the craftsmanship of a saddle is exquisite or gross, the actual technology is similarly crude, about on par with furniture, which varies greatly in refinement, but not in basic concept.  In saddles there is a single, shared bearing structure (the tree), with a seat on top and panels underneath.  Since all the pattern pieces have to meld harmoniously to the shape of the tree above and beneath, the reality is that it isn’t always possible to achieve a particular rider feel without affecting horse fit.

So, here’s the nub of it: do you, dear reader, want a saddle that is designed from the rider down to the horse, or from the horse up to the rider? That should be a rhetorical question, but sadly it isn’t. There are any number of saddles on the market that are immensely popular with riders precisely because they are designed so well for human appeal.  Apparently it’s not too hard to convince people that the saddles they love best for themselves will also do justice to their horses.

If I ruled the world of saddle fitting, I would decree that everyone who buys a saddle – and certainly anyone who fits or sells saddles – should have at least some clue as to what sort of bearing structure is sandwiched between the seat and the panels of the saddle in question.  It’s really critical to know something about this, but it’s shockingly rare.

Instead, people obsess over what is visually accessible to them – like whether the angle on the gusset of a wool-stuffed panel precisely matches the contour of the horse’s back while he is standing in the cross-ties half-asleep and the saddle is unloaded with a rider. Or whether a tube of chapstick comes to an uneasy rest in what might conceivably be interpreted as precisely the “right place” on the seat of the saddle.

Sometimes it makes me want to shriek, “Lipstick on a pig, people!” embellishing the cry, maybe more than once, with the gerund form of a very satisfying four-letter Anglo-Saxon word, for effing emphasis.

I do wonder at times whether I will end up spending some interval of my afterlife in hell for the times I myself have been sucked in by the seven deadly sins of saddle fitting.  In an earlier blog entry, I alluded to the belief system I had as a baby saddle fitter, back when I was repping for a brand and had only the thinnest veneer of training and essentially no accurate understanding of saddle design technology.

What I had was a fuzzy security blanket, also known as the seven rules of saddle fitting, though these are somewhat stretchy in both number and interpretation.  My early worldview was anchored by that little set of rules – the basic checklist that is widely circulated in magazine articles and saddle vendors’ websites for guidance.  I also had what I considered at the time a “mentor,” which was helpful in interpreting the seven rules much more permissively than I might have been confident doing on my own.  But that connection was crassly commercial, and it didn’t last long. And, oh yeah, for a little while at least, I also had a remarkable capacity for suspending disbelief.

So, I’ve decided to do a little series which I hope will jolt you, dear readers, into some healthy skepticism regarding what we all think we know about saddle fitting.  My wise and talented young friend Lauren Sprieser said it best: “The learning curve is bell-shaped;” so now, after years and years fitting thousands of saddles, I’m well over the hump and plummeting down the far side toward a realization that I actually know way less than I used to about how the whole saddle fit thing works.  I know only one hard and fast rule: Mother Nature did not intend horses’ backs to be weight-bearing.  My job is damage control.

So, as far as I’m concerned, those seven effing rules can just effing eff themselves.  In my, ahem, more mature worldview, what we need is deeper, more genuine technical understanding of how saddles fit from the inside out.   Reliance on a superficial checklist can ultimately be harmful to horses by obscuring what really counts, so I think we ought to trash that old blankie.

I just returned (well, three weeks ago) from a trip south to do a saddle fitting clinic and teaching seminar.  While there, I spent a couple of days with one of our long-time clients, a professional rider who is an international-level competitor and trainer.   She was having some training issues with a very talented (and ridiculously charming) young horse who was . . . ah . . . resisting the opportunity to progress to the next level, of which he was certainly capable.  Recently his saddle had also started slipping to one side.

After careful scrutiny of the saddle and the horse moving under saddle, I had no clear idea what to do.   His saddle seemed to fit well, but it was slipping right. We tried him in another saddle.  We tried some other stuff. Long story short: the problem was obvious but the reason for it was not. 

We discussed what mechanical fixes might be applied temporarily to put a patch on the slipping saddle problem, acknowledging that the root cause of the problem would require time and patience to determine.

A couple of weeks later, the trainer called to report that, along with changes to the horse’s schedule and training regimen, she had gotten creative in shimming the saddle with a Prolite saddle fitters pad as a temporary, easily reversible aid to keeping the saddle level while the horse worked through his one-sided issues.  The saddle was no longer slipping right, the horse was refreshed in mind and body by the changes to his program, and he was working with a vastly better attitude.

So because the trainer kept an open mind about a whole array of factors that could play a role in the overall problem, the situation improved.  Before long, they were back on track together.  

From the outset, what the client had said was, “I need help pin-pointing what is going on with this horse and whether the slipping saddle is the problem or is the visible manifestation of other issues.” Never once had she said, “The saddle is slipping; therefore the problem is the saddle.” 

That, dear readers, is the difference between a top-drawer professional who has what it takes to train young horses to stratospheric level, and the rest of us: owning the knowledge that the interface between horse and rider is complex, training and performance are complex, and there are not always big, convenient targets on which to pin the blame when things don’t go smoothly between rider, horse and saddle. 

We commiserated a bit about the bell-shaped nature of the learning curve in this business.  The novice realizes she doesn’t know a lot; the intermediate is confident that she knows quite a lot about a lot of things.  A rare few advance to the point where things that are obvious to the intermediate aren’t obvious at all to the real expert. 

Needless to say, the geometry of trees and the physics of load-bearing structures were never specifically addressed in my training as a saddle fitter, nor have they featured in any significant way in any book or magazine article I have ever read on the subject.

Without a doubt, good saddle fitters have valuable insights about fit based on empirical knowledge and experience, and I have been fortunate to have had mentors who are arguably the best saddle fitters in the world.  But here is a source of persistent frustration.  Over the years, I have asked the great ones: how do you actually know that a particular saddle fits the horse?  When it works, how do you know exactly why does it work?  And how do you pinpoint the problem (and the solution) with accuracy when a saddle isn’t right?

In essence, the answer always boils down to: “I’ve done this for decades and I have a good eye.”  Decades of experience and a good eye are invaluable assets to any professional, of course, but I would argue that reliance on conventional wisdom is not a methodology for either research or teaching.

It isn’t much of a leap to accept that behind the conventional wisdom about saddles and how to fit them lies the actual physics of what happens statically and dynamically between the bearing structure of the horse and the saddle.  Yet no one, to my knowledge, is breaking down (or elevating, really) saddle fitting to the level of a systematic, science-based methodology, or even claiming with much conviction that it is important to do this.

Instead, saddle makers and saddle fitters (even acclaimed “authorities” who write books on saddle fitting) seem pretty convinced of how saddles should fit strictly on the basis of the handing down of conventional wisdom, with almost nothing in the way of provable, research-based evidence.  Why?  Because conventional wisdom has been the accepted foundation of saddle fitting for years and years, and shifts in paradigm are never cheap or easy.

Several years ago, I began to get an inkling of how exciting it would be if we, as saddle fitters, could gain greater insight into the engineering aspect of saddle design and fit.  This slim shaft of illumination came not from anyone involved directly with fitting saddles, but from an engineer in an allied industry.  The long and the short of it is that not all conventional wisdom about saddles - even when it is pure and untainted by commercialism – has a solid basis in science.

Saddles are not in any way exempt from the laws of physics and geometry, though on the whole saddle fitters don’t tend to work by that methodology.  Certainly the Pliance research is a major step in that direction, but from what we are able to glean from the trickle of information seeping out, it is still a long way from providing a durable framework for research based in scientific method, let alone the development of a science-based protocol for saddle fitting.

For now it remains commercially convenient for most saddle marketers not to reveal too much specific information about the trees in their saddles, especially since it is hard for any of us to assess the exact shape of a tree inside a saddle when it is essentially invisible.  Instead people tend to fixate on what can be seen on the surface – like the width of the channel, for example, which can sometimes be a very, very misleading indicator of the shape or angles of the actual bearing structure.  Moreover, to a great extent, consumers have shown themselves quite willing  to suspend disbelief and accept at face value some rather questionable claims about how saddles fit and perform.

What if there really is some treasure to be reaped from the application of physics and geometry to the black art of saddle fitting?  What if there is a saddle equivalent of parabolic skis, which is a perfect example of a simple but brilliant application of geometry and physics to a thousand-year old technology.  As any skier will attest, adding side cut to skis – giving a parabolic shape to the edge of the ski as opposed to a straight edge – produces a channeled kinetic energy that creates power through a turn, making it easy for a skier to execute turns that would require a great deal more brute strength on straight-edged skis.

Imagine how much better horses might be able to carry dynamic weight – and never forget the first and great rule of saddle fitting: that horses never evolved to carry weight in the first place – if we could find a way to design trees that can dampen or disperse brutalizing kinetic energy far better than even the best trees can do now.  Maybe it’s a pipe dream anyway, but for sure it will never happen if no one is motivated even to try.

Getting to the barn was a bit of a challenge

I apologize for not posting in a timely way, but we are now back on-line after the ice storm earlier this month that is being described as the worst natural disaster in New Hampshire history.  We had no power or running water for ten days, though we kept toasty through sub zero weather and three snowfalls thanks to our trusty old wood stove, which by itself can heat the whole house and then some.  Our region looked like a war zone after heavy shelling by ice artillery, with many roads completely impassable due to thousands of snapped trees and power poles, and hundreds of thousands of homes without power throughout New Hampshire and in pockets of northern Massachussets and eastern Vermont.  By the time power was restored to almost all of the homes in the Monadnock region where we live — which was one of the areas hardest hit by the storm — there were 1250 power crews on the roads, which nearly outnumbers local residents! Just before Christmas we finally had power restored on our road by power line crews who came in from Michigan and Quebec, working tirelessly through unbelievably harsh winter conditions.  We are sincerely thankful to the dedicated line crews who rode to the rescue from all over the United States and Canada, and to the local folks from our community organizations and churches who briskly and cheerfully stepped up to the plate by providing shelter, hot meals all day-every day, hot showers, plentiful clean water for the horses, as well as much-needed camaraderie.  What a moving expression of Garrison Keillor’s closing benediction, “May God grant you the wisdom to live in a small town.”

A small gallery of ice storm photos:

One obstacle after the other

Mt. Monadnock

The horses cannot have been too pleased about this

Canines and feline warm and toasty in front of the wood stove