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The Devil's Advocate in me notices:

 The poster on UD has been there for a long time (since 2001) with thousands of posts. However what she posted was from an unknown Patti, and "Forwarded from another list." We don't know anything about Patti, who actually claimed to participate in this email discussion with "the Faculty, Parelli Centers". While it's certainly possible this is a real email exchange, it would be a good idea to try to track down Patti and verify that this is a real person - not a troll.

 I'm not a member of UD and I'm not interested enough in doing this to jump thru the hoops to join and email the poster (Quelah) to ask how to get in touch with Patti to verify the story. If someone else who is an UD member is willing to do this, that would be nice. If there's a journalist lurking, I think this would make a great article - either verifying or debunking this letter and then publishing it in any magazine that doesn't take advertising from Parelli (those who take his advertising aren't likely to want to publish a story on this topic, no matter if the letter is true or not).

 I tried finding the author (Patti W.WA) by googling[1]. All I find is the repost "forwarded from another list" (or forum) over and over. The source list changes, one time it was a Welsh Mountain Pony list, another time it was a driving list but of course either of those could have been forwarded from yet another list or forum!

 jc

 [1] Google's search[2] is starting to really suck. If I google just on Patti I find very little. If I add in a phrase from the email, I'll find some posts. If I add in a *different* phrase from the email, I'll find NEW posts - posts that should have been found with the first search since all of the pages have the exact same letter text on them. Here's what I found so far:

 http://www.ultimatedressage.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=168991
http://www.flahorse.com/forums/showthread.php?t=22194
http://www.horsechitchat.com/equineforums/barnyard/2403-never-ceases-amaze-me.html
http://www.chronicleforums.com/Forum/showthread.php?t=224279
http://www.horseforum.com/natural-horsemanship/parelli-helmets-36285/

 [2] I even tried bing.com - they can't find any of these posts by searching on "Patti W.WA". The only matches they have are for a testimonial for a carpet store. It looks like Bing's search database is stale - it's from Microsoft so I'm not really surprised. :-)

 I tried Yahoo, they found just one of the 5 links Google found.

 I tried Dogpile, a meta search engine that searches other search sites - it didn't find even all the 5 links above with any of 3 or 4 different search strings and queries.

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>
> I find it fascinating that people get so freaked out about ditches > being more than 3 feet wide, when a normal canter stride on a normal > sized horse is 12 feet long. There is a common misconception that a jump is "just a long canter stride" or that jumping a ditch is "just a long canter stride". One mistake is thinking that the jump happens during the regular suspension phase of the canter stride. However, jumping anything, even a ditch, is not "just a long canter stride". The footfall of a jump and moment of suspension of the jump within the footfalls are both totally different from the footfalls and moment of suspension in a canter stride.
 
In a normal left lead canter stride, the horse lands with the right hind foot first, then about 3 feet further the left hind lands, with the right fore landing in tandem about 3 feet ahead of that, then about 3 feet after the right fore touches down, the left fore (leading leg) lands (about 9 feet ahead of the right hind) which happens after the right hind has already broken over and begun flight forward. During the moment of suspension the right hind comes forward and lands about 3 feet ahead of the left fore (about 12 feet forward of the previous landing) but at no point in the stride is there a "12 foot gap" between the group of footfalls.
 
You can test/prove this to yourself by cantering your horse on a freshly dragged area of the ring, then get off and examine the hoof prints. The takeoff point of the jump is where the front feet land at the end of a canter stride, but the horse doesn't just lift up the feet and clear the jump, commencing with a normal canter stride (starting with a hind hoof) on the other side. Instead, the horse changes the stride to produce the 4 footfalls of the jumping effort.
 
As the horse approaches the takeoff to a jump (at the end of the last full canter stride) the horse pushes off, pushes up with the front legs (only!) as they end the last regular stride, lifting the shoulders up to the angle for the take-off of the jumping stride. Then the hind legs are brought up to the same spot where the front legs were (not passing the front legs as happens during suspension in a regular canter stride), with the hind hoofs landing in the same spot (the "take-off spot") as the front hoofs. Then the horse pushes up from the hind legs to further propel the horse's body over the jump. On landing, the horse lands front legs first, landing and pushing up again (patting down and back up), bringing one (if not both) of the front legs into the air before the hind legs land. As the hind legs land the horse commences the first post-jump canter stride although the sequence will often be a 4-beat stride as the first-to-land front leg is often still in flight and can't land in tandem with the partner hind leg. The beginning of the jump starts with the front legs pushing off at the end of the previous stride. Then the footfall of the jumping "stride" is hind, hind, suspension, front, front - with a jump/suspension phase in an entirely different point in the hoof-falls from the regular canter stride of hind, hind/front, front, suspension.
 
For more info, see:
 

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