Surely, swaybacks have something to do with overloading and overwork, and, surely, extreme spinal curvature has to be disabling for horses Well, wrong, and wrong again. Here's the truth about those sagging toplines. That 2-year-old with what appears to be a huge notch cut out of his topline just behind the withers must belong on the disabled list for life, and that old pensioner with her bowed back and pendulous belly has earned her deformity from long years of hard ilding and fiequent pregnancies. Or so you'd think from looking at these abnormally conformed horses, but with swayhack-or, to put it clinically, lordosis-the cause and consequence of what you see are not at all what you'd expect Even when the spinal deformity is truly startling to behold, the affected hoise functions as though he or she were normalfv conformed.
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