I felt a little like I did when I closed a kid’s fingers in the car door….That sick to your stomach feeling. I was brushing my horse a couple of days after a perfectly sensible trail ride, and he cringed slightly as I curried the right side of his back. A closer look showed a circular patch of scurfy skin with a raised area that had oozed a slightly yellowish serum.  What happened?

The short answer is that it could have been many things, or a combination of several factors. In this case, I had three significant issues 1) My pad was dirty. 2) I was carrying an easy boot on the right side of my saddle, 3) my back was sore.  The end result was that the rear of my saddle was sitting about 1” to the right of my horse’s spine making the right tree point jam mercilessly into the back of his right shoulder. I should have been attentive to the fact that he didn’t want to pick up his right lead at the canter, preferred me posting on the right diagonal, and was carrying his head slightly off center.

Balance of a saddle is tremendously important. One of the beauties of a wool saddle is that it breaks in to both you and your horse. This is a little like your favorite pair of shoes they become more comfortable as they mold to your feet. However, there is a point when a saddle is broken in, and a point where the saddle is ‘broken’. We are not 100% symmetrical and neither are our horses. Within these limitations, there is a ‘normal operating range’ that has acceptable tolerances for symmetry or lack thereof!  Problems arise when the saddle gets so far out of balance that it begins to hang off to one side, or nosedive into the withers and shoulders. Once a saddle starts to get crooked, it is a little like a car tire that starts to wear unevenly- it can be difficult to get it back in balance again, and over time, this is the pre-cursor to a tree becoming twisted. We sometimes have riders who report a saddle with a crooked tree. The only way that you can truly make that diagnosis is to tear the saddle completely down and put the tree on the bench. When we have done this, 95% of the time, the tree is fine, but often the panels have compressed unequally or have been sewn to the saddle unevenly. It is a poor idea to hang things off the saddle. If you must carry extra gear, invest in a saddle pack that sits behind the saddle, and make sure it is attached securely so it doesn’t shift to one side.

I think a shim pad is almost a necessity in order for you keep your saddle riding properly during weight and conditioning changes in your horse. Some people like to have their saddle flocked every few months. Over time, the panels of the saddle will start to get stretched out and sometimes misshapen. Depending on the quality and flexibility of the panel leather, we have seen saddles with one panel larger or longer than the other one. It is much more difficult to remove flocking than it is to add it. Pulling flocking out often results in pockets and divots that almost never become completely smooth. The beauty of the shim pad is that it allows you to experiment with small corrections to the balance of the saddle. If you need to make the adjustment more permanent, you can tell your saddler that you ‘raised the right rear corner of the saddle by the thickness of 2 felt shims’. That is a very reasonable way to explain fitting adjustments if it is not possible to have the saddle, horse and saddler all at the same place.