Читать книгу Equine Lameness for the Layman. Tools for Prompt Recognition, Accurate Assessment, and Proactive Management онлайн

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Consider the analogy of your car’s front-end alignment and how it affects tire wear. Poor alignment would be considered a primary issue. Accelerated tire wear would be expected to occur secondary to poor alignment. The expensive and time-consuming application of new tires might improve your car’s performance in the short term, but the persistence of poor alignment will repeatedly result in premature tire depletion. The appropriate course of action is unidirectional: fix the car’s alignment first, then evaluate the status of the tires to determine if and when replacement is necessary. Successful management of a horse’s soundness over the long term requires a similar approach.

Those of us that regularly and carefully observe our horses in motion will see fewer complicated cases because we are more likely to detect gait abnormalities soon after their onset and before additional primary or secondary issues have time to develop. Unless it’s due to a common traumatic event, it is relatively rare for two separate, unrelated problems to occur simultaneously. In this way, regular observation actually simplifies the process of evaluation by making the incidence of multifactorial and secondary lameness less probable.