Knowing when Your Horse’s Saddle Needs To Be Checked

Hi, I'm Ken Lyndon-Dykes from Saddleworld. We will be looking at saddles today and various fittings but before we think about that, why do you need your saddle checked and what effect is it going to have on your horse?

Now all of us have seen horses where you go into a stable, with a saddle in your arms and it runs to the back of the stable because it’s thinking ‘oh boy, I don’t want a saddle fitted on me today.’ That’s a fairly good clue there might be a problem.

Also, bucking, shying when you're putting it on, horse turning round to bit you are all things that should give you a fair idea that this is not a happy horse and you’re not going to get the best performance out of your horse if he’s unhappy.

Saddle fitting is not brain surgery, it is a lot of common sense but there are certain points you have to be sure to make sure are correct and then you can at least be happy in your own mind that the saddle does fit. If the horse is behaving in a peculiar or odd way perhaps its the saddle, or it’s not the saddle and if it isn't you look for another solution.

I hope you enjoyed our video today. Please bear in mind all we have done today is check saddles in a static manner but that’s not nearly enough. If all of the points fit, if the saddle fits and everythinglooks good, that’s great, but then we have to ride on the saddle.

Sometimes a saddle can look fine and passes all of the static tests, really that doesn’t cut it when it comes to riding, if the horse’s behaving badly, or the saddle will move, it might swing from side to side, it might bounce up and down, in which case we need to look further. Of course, you would go to your saddle fitter to do that.  

When we are fitting new saddles we put several saddles on and get a short list thatpass all the static tests, we then go on to the riding tests and bit by bit we will narrow them down to find the correct saddle.