I haven't followed this thread completly,but here's what I've observed with some of the crosses I've seen/been called out to do Jin Shin on out here.
A client of mine that does a show circuit hunters bought a gorgeous swan necked 3yo Trakenher/TB cross for somewhere close to $75,000.00 . He was started slowly for that venue at age 3(a bad idea in my book none-the-less) & by age four started to have some serious problems with balance & stiffness to one side. When I went out to see him on the first visit, my initial intuition was that his neck was too long & fine to support his very beautiful, but large warm blood head. My gut feeling was that something in his neck was causing the hind end to cave out from under him & suggested they have him immediately evalauted by a Vet & to not even think about an Equine Chiro until they had him thoroughly checked. Since they had just done a pre-purchase exam, they did not. His shoeing & saddlefit looked fine to me. 3 months later he was started falling down under saddle when turned & Vet was finally called. The Vet found an un-healed stress fracture in C6 that he said had probably been there for a few monthes which of course was the cause of his problems. The fracture became worse over the next 3-4 weeks & this horse had to be put down. The Vet said that he was certain from the placement of the fracture that this was from his neck being unable to support his head & that he had seen this in quite a few Warmblood X's & Arabs the past 5 years. I've personally seen similar in both Arabs & in Mini's that are being bred for more & more human "appearance" taste preferences. Even though the mini's aren't ridden, they suffer because there is not enough room in their head for their teeth or in their pelvis to carry their babies. On the other hand, I saw a few successful early cross breedings at Viking Saga that resulted in happy, healthy individuals with wonderful temperments who shared many years carrying their people down the trail. Some may not have had what many consider "pure" gaits for an Icelandic & some were only 3 gaited, but they were happy, healthy & sound until they died in their late 20's. The ones I saw were blessed to have owners who appreciated them as individuals not for just their gait, but many are not so fortunate. No one knows for sure, but I think these were crossed with some of Fritz's standardbred horses with the original Danish breeding for the Icelandic side. It gave much more size/good bone/great temperment, but not so good gaits (read toelt) in most. I think that some crosses work wonderfully in horses /dogs & cats, but when we cross horses that are going be ridden we need to give careful thought to the worse case scenario that could occur before we breed because the animal suffers a life in a misshapen body not the human who thought it up. Kaaren
