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Date Posted: 17:07:33 05/14/09 Thu
Author: Sara R
Subject: Re: Degrading the breed?
In reply to: Sam D 's message, "Re: Degrading the breed?" on 14:20:35 05/14/09 Thu

Not necessarily apart but yes between 50 and 100 miles would be what we, in my area, would consider quite a small chunk of "ranch" property.

FYI: n U.S. land surveying, a section is an area nominally one mile square, containing 640 acres

Endurance horses are also travelling straight and at a good pace (trott primarily), not gathering cattle between ridges and draws or keeping them moving straight etc...grabbing up loose stock and whatnot. When you add babies to the mix it even gets more hairy because you can't move too fast, duh, babies and at the same time moms and babes get separated causing some ammount of panic among the cows (moms) and so you're constantly fighting to keep mom's heading straight because she's damn sure that you left her baby back where you gathered her up (seriously they're pretty stupid).

Basically moving cattle on horseback is walking a zig zag for however many miles it takes to get them to the destination your headed, that's not counting the time taken gathering all the cattle up on the property they were spread out on which is usually a pretty hilly 60acre spread, or more. On the moves I worked on we drove about two hous or so to the destination, unloaded and gathered, once gathered all together we headed out, usually we were moving more than one ranchers herd so we'd have to splinter off, which required stopping and cutting/separating cattle and sending them and their ranchers on their way (all horses involved in the cutting and whatnot were the same horses pushing the cattle and gathering) there were about three such stops total when bringing the cattle down from the hills...and, Yes I suppose we may have travelled some 50-100 miles...I was too busy keeping the cattle going and in a group etc...to count how many miles we actually travelled.

To compare the one with the other, endurance riding with moving cattle and ranch work, is like comparing apples to oranges...98% of the horses on these moves were 100% working QH by breeding, the other 2% included mine and my friend's mount which were Arabian geldings...this is also worthy to note if you insist on comparing the two activities... FYI if a horse trotts behind a cow that cow will most likely be moving at a gallop and if not, he soon will be as panic will set in... Cutting cattle and whatnot is no simple task either...not sure if you've ever seen the work done but it's not leisurely by any means.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlnZ5roGPF4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSuw3ZYPNtg

In the above videos these folks are in corrals already, most people doing cattle work as described above don't have the advantage of much more than a corner fence and the gate to the next section or whatever... As you can hopefully see, the comparison etc... is just not there. FYI most endurance horses would wipe the floor with working ranch horses as far as endurance goes...different builds for different jobs...incidently working cattle horses tend to be heavier in bone and shorter in muscle than endurance horses...many endurance horses may also be more spooked by cattle than their working cattle horse counterparts...this lends interesting information to the question of build and conformation v job the animal is meant to do...

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