Graham Equine Sports Therapy

Cribbers and Bodywork: Why Are Some So Good at Receiving It?

When we talk about cribbing, we usually talk about why horses do it.

Stress. Ulcers and gastrointestinal health. Management. Stereotypic behavior. Endorphins and the way cribbing helps some horses regulate how they feel.

But bodyworkers often notice something else.

Some cribbers are remarkably good at receiving bodywork.

They settle into it. They become deeply engaged with touch. They seem highly aware of changes occurring in their bodies.

And at the same time, they have spent months or years repeatedly performing a powerful physical action involving the teeth, jaw, throat, neck and often the entire front of the body.

These two things are worth looking at together.

What has cribbing taught the horse about changing his own internal state?

And what has performing that same physical action thousands upon thousands of times done to his body?

Cribbing Is a Physical Action

Watch a cribber closely. This isn’t a small movement.

The horse anchors his incisors on a fixed surface, recruits the jaw and throat, positions and contracts the neck and often braces or pulls through the front of his body.

Then he repeats it.

Again and again.

If a horse performed almost any other movement this frequently, we would consider that repetition when assessing his muscles, posture and movement.

Cribbing deserves the same consideration.

The jaw and muscles of mastication are obvious participants. The horse grips the surface with his incisors while structures associated with the jaw, tongue and throat participate in the action.

Then look at the neck.

The characteristic cribbing movement repeatedly recruits the cervical musculature. The poll and upper cervical region, ventral neck and muscles connecting the head, neck, sternum and shoulder all deserve attention.

The hyoid and laryngeal region are also anatomically involved in the cribbing action. These are sensitive structures and not areas for aggressive manipulation, but their involvement reminds us that cribbing is far more than a horse simply grabbing something with his teeth.

And the movement doesn’t stop at the base of the neck.

Follow the Movement Into the Rest of the Body

A horse pulling or bracing against a cribbing surface has to stabilize his body.

Watch the shoulders and forelimbs. Watch the base of the neck and thoracic sling. Watch what happens through the trunk when the horse pulls against the surface.

Repeated head and neck positioning also becomes part of the horse’s habitual muscular use. Over thousands of repetitions, that matters to the rest of the topline.

This doesn’t mean every cribber develops an identical collection of tight muscles.

The individual horse’s cribbing technique is more useful than simply knowing he is a cribber.

Watch him.

How high is his preferred cribbing surface?

How does he position his head and poll?

How strongly does he contract or arch his neck?

Does he pull backward?

Does he brace through his forelimbs and shoulders?

Does his weight shift backward?

Does he repeatedly use exactly the same position?

You are watching a movement pattern that this horse has practiced an extraordinary number of times.

That is valuable information when you put your hands on him.

So Why Are Some Cribbers So Good at Bodywork?

This is where the neurological side of cribbing becomes especially interesting.

Cribbing has been associated with stress physiology, gastrointestinal health, dopamine and reward systems and the endogenous opioid system—the body’s own endorphins and related opioid peptides.

This is where the familiar idea that cribbing releases endorphins comes from.

That explanation became oversimplified into the idea that horses crib because they get an endorphin “high.” The physiology is more complex than that.

What is important is that an established stereotypy can function as a form of self-regulation.

The horse isn’t necessarily performing a meaningless repetitive action. Cribbing changes his sensory experience and physiological state, and the behavior becomes strongly established because it serves a function for him.

This also helps explain why simply preventing an established cribber from cribbing doesn’t solve the problem. The motivation and physiological processes behind the behavior are still there, and preventing access to the behavior can increase stress.

Now think about what happens during good bodywork.

Bodywork provides another powerful source of sensory information.

Touch changes sensory input from the skin, fascia, muscles and joints. Muscular guarding changes. Autonomic activity changes. The nervous system receives a continuous stream of information about what is happening throughout the body. Endogenous pain-regulating systems are involved as the horse settles and the experience becomes comfortable and predictable.

Horses also learn to receive bodywork.

A horse that initially watches every movement of the therapist often becomes increasingly skilled at participating in the experience. He recognizes what touch means. He begins to anticipate it. He learns that he can soften rather than protect himself against it.

That makes the cribber particularly interesting.

A horse that has spent years using a highly repetitive sensory-motor behavior to alter his internal state already has extensive experience with the relationship between physical action and how his body feels.

Bodywork offers a very different route to changing that internal state.

This gives us a useful way to understand why some cribbers appear so exceptionally receptive to it without reducing the explanation to, “They like endorphins.”

The Cribber Gives Us Two Important Pieces of Information

For the bodyworker, cribbing has both a neurological and a mechanical side.

It is a deeply established behavior associated with regulation, reward, sensory processing and internal state.

It is also a highly repetitive physical action that loads the jaw, throat, neck and structures used to brace and stabilize the body.

Those aren’t separate stories.

The same horse is doing both.

Years of cribbing can influence the tissues and movement patterns we encounter under our hands, while the regulatory function of cribbing helps us understand something about the horse receiving the work.

Bodywork isn’t a treatment for cribbing. Releasing the jaw or neck isn’t going to remove the neurological, gastrointestinal, environmental or learned factors behind an established stereotypy.

But knowing that a horse cribs should change what we look at.

Assess the muscles of mastication and jaw region.

Pay attention to the poll and cervical musculature.

Don’t overlook the ventral neck.

Follow the pattern into the base of the neck, shoulders, thoracic sling and topline.

And, most importantly, watch the horse crib.

The movement itself tells you what he repeatedly asks his body to do.

Then watch him during bodywork.

A cribber who becomes deeply absorbed in the work is telling you something too.

Cribbing isn’t only a behavior happening in the horse’s brain, and it isn’t only a repetitive movement happening in his muscles.

It involves both.

Understanding that gives us a much more useful picture of the horse under our hands.

https://koperequine.com/a-few-signs-of-poll-head-upper-neck-issues/

Did you know? Landings can be postural?

Farriers are taught to pay close attention to how a horse lands.

Medial first? Lateral first? Toe first? Heel first? Level?

And this is important. Gross hoof imbalance can alter distal limb alignment, influence the orientation of the hoof as it meets the ground and create a pathological environment. Correcting that imbalance can absolutely improve landing.

But there is an important distinction that is often missed! The farrier does not have complete control over the landing.

Why?

Because landing occurs at the end of swing phase. During swing, the position of the hoof is being determined by the entire limb above it.

Muscle activation controls joint flexion and extension. The orientation of the carpus or tarsus, fetlock and distal joints influences the final position of the hoof. Tendon tension provides proprioceptive information to the nervous system. Conformation affects limb trajectory. Posture changes joint relationships. Fatigue and neuromuscular tone can alter limb placement. Myofascial physiology can create constrictions.

So the hoof that eventually meets the floor is the endpoint of a whole-body movement strategy.

I had a great example of this while working on a horse in Norway.

Before shoeing, the horse had a lateral landing. I assessed the hoof and corrected what I considered to be the underlying three-dimensional hoof imbalance.

Then we watched the horse again. The landing got worse. It was now landing very obviously on the lateral toe quarter.

At first glance, you might reasonably conclude that the shoeing was wrong. And if your primary measure of mediolateral balance is a level landing, the logical response would be to take the shoe back off and remove more lateral toe until the horse landed flatter.

But I was confident in the balance I had established. So rather than continuing to manipulate the hoof to chase the visual landing, we looked further up the system.

A fascial manipulation practitioner who was working with me assessed the horse and identified significant restrictions through the chest. She treated those restrictions.

We changed nothing on the foot. We watched the horse again. It landed level.

That is a hugely important clinical lesson. The hoof had not changed. The shoe had not changed. The trim had not changed. The horse above the hoof had changed.

This is entirely consistent with the framework developed in my upcoming book. Changes in posture, muscle tone or fascial stiffness within the scapulothoracic sling can influence swing phase, limb placement and therefore landing behaviour. Farriery can influence posture and landing, but it operates within constraints imposed by the rest of the neuromuscular and myofascial system.

This is why we need to understand the difference between landing and loading.

Landing is primarily a kinematic event. It describes the orientation of the hoof at initial ground contact. Loading is a kinetic event. Once the hoof contacts the ground, force rises, the centre of pressure migrates, joint moments develop and the structures of the digit begin resolving ground reaction force.

And importantly!

Landing does not reliably predict loading.

Research discussed in the book has shown that the orientation of initial contact does not reliably correspond to centre-of-pressure distribution later in stance. A horse can land laterally and subsequently load centrally. A visually level landing can still develop asymmetric loading as force increases.

This matters because the hoof does not remodel according to what it did for the first instant of contact.

Morphology reflects the forces applied, sustained and accumulated through stance.
And this forces must be resolved by the rest of the body.
Impulse and repeated midstance loading contribute to the time-dependent deformation and adaptation that ultimately shape the hoof capsule and create a bi-directional relationship between hoof morphology and posture.

So imagine what could have happened in the Norway case.

If I had looked only at the lateral landing and continued removing lateral hoof until it looked level, I might have altered a hoof that was already mechanically balanced in an attempt to compensate for a problem originating elsewhere in the system.

I could have created hoof imbalance to compensate for postural asymmetry.

That is the danger of chasing landings.

This does not mean we ignore landing. Farriers absolutely influence it, and grossly abnormal landing can be valuable information.

It means we need to recognise its variables and, importantly, recognise the limits of trimming and shoeing.

Once hoof imbalance has been appropriately addressed, persistent landing asymmetry should make us ask another question!

Is the hoof still causing the landing, or is the landing now telling us something about the horse? Or is it simply normal for that individual?

The relationship works in both directions.

Hoof balance → limb orientation → proprioception → muscle and fascial tone → posture.

But also

Posture → muscle and fascial tone → limb orientation and swing phase → landing → stance mechanics → impulse → hoof morphology.

It is a closed loop.

And that means good modern farriery sometimes requires knowing when not to take any more hoof away.

This distinction between landing and loading, how posture influences the hoof, how the hoof influences posture, and where the limits of farriery sit within that system is exactly the kind of discussion we will be getting into during the TED USA Tour clinics.

Because sometimes the most important thing a landing tells the farrier is that the answer isn’t in the foot.