In the first installment of this series on horse gaits and their effect on the hooves, you learned to analyze ambling gaits using film strips and also how to tell from film footage whether a horse is lame. In this article, we focus on horses that can amble.

Like other biologists, I use the term “amble” not to mean any specific gait but in the generic sense, meaning any gait that has no period of suspension but that proceeds faster and with greater energy than an “ordinary,” “working” or “flat” walk.

The walk and the amble both have four sounded beats per stride and no period of suspension. The difference is the characteristically greater energy output in the amble. The amble is, therefore, a form…