Thursday, November 18, 2010

Basic Equine Anatomy

This is the beginning of a series of tutorial articles. It’s taken me a while to complete them as I wrote them in the order that happened to interest me at the time instead of an order that would make sense. I started with a lengthy article about the mechanics of the lower leg, but had to work backwards to explain safety, basic tools and their use, and now anatomy.

When talking about anatomy, I try to be as specific as possible.  This tends to lead to lot of a technical terms, some commonly known and some not-so-common.  And a few not-so-technical.  I’m fond of the word “feetsies” instead of hooves.  It embarrasses my farrier.

The following illustration includes both.  You may want to refer back to this for future tutorials.

(click to embiggin)
Photobucket

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm glad to see you back and posting! And tutorials will be great. I do have one point of contention, however. I would argue that horses of both genders have "bits"! Although female horses have more bits :)

Laura Skillern said...

Good point! I was originally tempted to just put "bits" labels in both areas, but I've seen enough hermaphrodite customs that I thought being specific could be helpful. :)