What is a cold-backed horse?

The Society of Master Saddlers maintains a register of qualified saddle fitters who will ensure that your horse’s saddle fits properly. Any parts of the saddle (and girth) that pinch, rub or exert uneven pressures around the horse’s thorax have the potential to produce cold-backed behaviour and should be the first things to eliminate.

Possible triggers of a cold-backed horse

According to research, some horses with kissing spines are said to be cold-backed as “many of these horses may have clinical back pain that eases with exercise”. Without X-rays it’s impossible to distinguish between horses who meet the modern definition of a cold-backed horse and those who have transient back pain due to kissing spines.

The approach to managing these two distinct groups is potentially very different and one may even require surgery, so it’s important to check that a horse really doesn’t have a pathological basis for their exercise-responsive back stiffness before assuming it’s simply a case of being a cold-backed horse.

Is cold-backed behaviour ‘learned’?

Another possibility is ‘learned’ cold-back behaviour in a horse following episodes of pathological back pain. This could be, for instance, in horses who have suffered acute injury to the supraspinous ligament (this is the ligament that runs along the top of the spine) and have then started ridden work too early.

It seems that these horses ‘learn’ that having a saddle and rider on an injured back genuinely hurts and so they begin to associate being tacked up and mounted with pain. The danger in this line of thinking is in going a step further and concluding that horses anticipate pain even when it’s no longer there. It would be more astute to ask whether a horse who develops a cold back following recovery from a back injury has not yet fully recovered and is still in pain.

The cold-back conundrum

It is possible that all of the various causes of cold backs share pain as a common factor. If this is the case and a cold back is simply a response to pain, it begs the question as to why these horses seem to work out the problem. If they didn’t, they would just have sore backs (or soreness elsewhere).