It seems like a simple and unremarkable statement. When I heard Charels de Kunffy say it in passing in an interview with Patrick King on his Talking About Horses podcast it nearly knocked me out of my seat.

It is simple and it is insignificant but it also fits perfectly with everything I’ve seen in my study of whorls. It was fun to hear it talked about as a normal and accepted piece of training knowledge. I’m not the only one seeing this. It also described the effects of the patterns I see.

Most horses will weight the left leg heavier, the right leg will be lighter and in the air more. We can see this in the higher right pectoral whorl and hair growing across the chest to the left shoulder. But why do we care? If the effects aren’t strong enough to create lameness or high low syndrome, why does it matter?

It matters because everything about the horse matters. Every difference and unevenness in the horse is going to affect training and ability. As de Knuffy went on to say, our goal is to train the horse to ambidexterity. The end goal is to be able to move with equal ability in either direction, not to have them falling out to one side.

Most horses will fall out to one shoulder in small amounts. Horses with severely uneven pectoral whorls will fall out more strongly and be harder to bring to straightness. Some very small number of horses will have a higher pectoral whorl on the left front or the chest hair will grow across to the right fore leg. That shows the opposite effect. Maybe this master trainer has one thing wrong. There are a very few horses will fall out to the left shoulder.

We can tell which horses are which and how extreme the effect will be just by looking at the whorls on the chest. It never ceases to amaze me.

Find the full podcast here. Very brief comments about horses being right or left handed and falling out through the right shoulder are just after the 45 minute mark. https://www.academyforclassicalhorsemanship.com/.../21489...

Want to learn more about pectoral whorls and all the other body whorls with so much information to give us? Check out Horse Whorls; A Study of the Body, by Noche Miller available on Amazon.