As an organization dedicated to promoting and improving the quality of show horses, the National Snaffle Bit Association has launched a data gathering project that will evaluate the effectiveness of our current educational protocol for judges. The information will be used to provide future education for not only the judges, but exhibitors, who may or may not be aware of the standard for which they are being judged.
Two items will be reviewed from the data collected; 1) the percentage of horses being presented with a two-beat jog in a Western Pleasure class and 2) the agreement on the standard by which the jog is judged in any given Western Pleasure class.
The NSBA Judges Committee recognizes that the jog is just one element of the evaluation of a horse’s overall performance used in judging Western Pleasure. The intent of the project is to be able to present more meaningful education for both judges and exhibitors, encouraging both to meet the standard of excellence while judging Western Pleasure and showing the Western Pleasure horses to the best of their ability.
The NSBA Official Handbook outlines a judging hierarchy that is used to evaluate gaits. The three tiers of the hierarchy, in order of importance, are correctness, quality and degree of difficulty. Rule 138 in the 2022 NSBA Official Handbook has detailed descriptions of each gait using the following terms, excellent, very good, good, average or correct, poor, very poor and extremely poor. These gait descriptions were initially introduced to produce the first “Standards for The Western Pleasure Horse” video in 2005 and are the basis of the educational video currently used on HorseIQ.
NSBA has selected five shows where judges will be asked to denote on their judge’s cards, horses that are performing a two-beat jog. In no particular order, judges will be asked to mark the numbers on the back of their cards of horses that, in their opinion, perform a two-beat jog, regardless of quality or degree of difficulty. The data that is gathered will be utilized in future educational material.
Shows selected for this project include:
- A Sudden Impulse NSBA Show and Futurity
- Back to Berrien Futurity
- Tom Powers Triple Challenge Futurity
- NSBA World Championship Show and Breeders Championship Futurity
- The Championship NSBA Show and Futurity
CLICK HERE to read more from NSBA.
