Crescent Moon Equine Bodywork

03/01/2026

Great post on the importance of proper saddle fit 👏🏼

02/28/2026

I am not well versed in driving but I thought it was amazing to see how much the horse is using its tail for balance in the tight turns.

Really brings into perspective that the tail is not just there to help swat flies and be pretty but it is indeed an extension of the spine used for mobility and balance. Super cool!

854 likes, 29 comments. “ ”

02/27/2026

What a great article to pair with my post! So many good points as to why bodywork and dentistry pair so well together to help keep the horse balanced and comfortable.

02/25/2026

With dental season just around the corner, I wanted to take a moment to talk about the importance of having your horse’s teeth evaluated and why having a thoughtful, collaborative team of equine professionals in your corner truly matters.

Just like humans, horses need regular dental care although they’re not as concerned about having pearly whites. Their teeth are about function, not cosmetics, and proper dental balance is essential for comfort, digestion, and full-body movement.

And just like people, not every horse loves the dentist… but it’s a necessary part of keeping them comfortable and able to live a healthy, happy life — especially if we expect them to perform, carry a rider, or move with softness and ease.

✨ What does an equine dentist actually do — and why does it matter for bodywork? ✨

🦷 They evaluate and restore balance within the mouth.

A “balanced” mouth means the cheek teeth (molars and premolars) are relatively level from front to back, and the incisors are even and properly aligned. When the teeth meet evenly, the horse can grind forage effectively and move the jaw freely.

If the mouth is imbalanced, certain teeth grow longer than others. This prevents proper contact and creates uneven wear patterns.

From a bodywork perspective, chronic dental imbalance often shows up as:

🐴Tightness through the masseter and pterygoid muscles
🐴TMJ restriction
🐴Poll tension
🐴Asymmetry through the atlas and cervical spine
🐴Compensation through the hyoid, sternum, and even the thoracic sling

The mouth is not separate from the body, it’s a major driver of it.

🦷 They check for infection and food trapping (diastemas).

A diastema is an abnormal gap between teeth where food can become impacted. When feed gets trapped, it ferments and decays, leading to gum inflammation and infection.

A horse dealing with oral pain may:
🐴Guard the jaw
🐴Avoid full lateral chewing
🐴Develop protective tension patterns
🐴Resist contact or bend

Persistent low-grade discomfort in the mouth can create global bracing patterns you’ll feel long before you ever see obvious symptoms.

🦷 They address hooks and sharp points.

Horses’ teeth continuously erupt throughout much of their lives. They’re born with a reserve crown in the jaw that gradually emerges to compensate for wear. In the wild, horses spend 10–17 hours a day grazing, which helps maintain more even wear.

Domesticated diets and feeding patterns alter that natural wear.

Because the upper jaw is wider than the lower jaw and horses chew in a side-to-side elliptical motion, certain areas don’t fully grind against each other. Over time, sharp enamel points form on the outside of the upper teeth and the inside of the lower teeth, along with hooks on the
front or back molars.

These sharp edges can:
🐴Cut the cheeks and tongue
🐴Limit lateral excursion of the jaw
🐴Create protective tension in the poll and throatlatch
🐴Contribute to “stuck” feeling in flexion or difficulty accepting the bit
When the jaw can’t move freely, the body cannot move freely.

🦷 They evaluate incisor balance and TMJ function.

The incisors — the “smile” teeth — play a major role in how the jaw aligns and rotates. Balanced incisors allow healthy motion of the temporomandibular joint (TMJ), where the lower jaw meets the skull just behind the eye.

Restriction in the TMJ doesn’t stay local. It can influence:
🐴The poll and atlas
🐴The hyoid apparatus
🐴Cervical spine mobility
🐴Rib cage and thoracic sling engagement
🐴Even hind-end push through fascial chains

If you’re addressing recurring poll tightness, asymmetrical bend, difficulty picking up one lead, or chronic sternum restriction… it’s always worth considering what’s happening in the mouth.

Dental balance and body balance are deeply connected.

02/23/2026

This 👏🏼

“Soft hands make the bit soft” is one of the most repeated phrases in riding… and also one of the most misleading.

Hands do not determine whether a bit is comfortable.
Pressure distribution, mouth anatomy, tongue volume, palate height, bar width, and lip pressure determine whether a bit is comfortable.

A rider can have the quietest, kindest hands in the world and still be riding in a bit that concentrates force onto delicate tissue, collapses the tongue, crowds the palate, or creates constant baseline pressure before the rein is ever picked up.

Soft hands do not magically change physics.

If a bit is thick in a small mouth, it is still thick.
If a mouthpiece pinches, it still pinches.
If a cheekpiece creates leverage, it still creates leverage.
If a port contacts the palate, it still contacts the palate.

Soft hands cannot override a bit's inherent design.

This saying places responsibility in the wrong place.
It suggests that discomfort only happens when riders are “bad,” rough, or heavy handed.

But many horses show tension, resistance, head tossing, tongue issues, behind-the-bit behavior, and contact avoidance while being ridden by extremely tactful, educated riders.

Not because the rider is cruel.
Not because the rider lacks feel.
But because the bit itself is incompatible with that horse’s oral anatomy.

We also need to talk about neutral pressure.

Some bits apply pressure simply by existing in the mouth... before reins ever engage. Tongue compression, bar loading, palate proximity, and lip tension can all occur at rest.

So the question isn’t:
“Do you have soft hands?”
The question is:
“Is this bit structurally capable of being comfortable in this specific mouth?”
Hands influence how much pressure is applied.
Bit design determines where that pressure goes.

Both matter.

Neither replaces the other.
Kind riding is not just a feeling for the rider. It also includes how the horse feels.

If a bit requires perfect hands 100% of the time to avoid pain, it’s not a kind bit.

02/13/2026

🚨Biosecurity Update🚨

Due to regional EHV-1 activity, I am implementing enhanced biosecurity protocols when traveling between barns

What I'm doing:
✔️ Rescheduling barns with known outbreaks
✔️ Wearing clean clothing at each barn
✔️ Changing or disinfecting footwear between barns
✔️ Washing or sanitizing hands between horses
✔️ Cleaning high-touch surfaces in my vehicle

Please let me know before your appointment if:
‼️ Any horse in the barn has had a fever in the last 14 days
‼️Any horse has shown neurological signs (stumbling, weakness, urine dribbling)
‼️A new horse has recently arrived
‼️The barn is under veterinary or state quarantine

If needed, we may reschedule to protect all horses involved.

Why this matters:
EHV-1 can spread through:
💉 Nose-to-nose contact
💉Shared equipment
💉 Hands, clothing, and boots

Many horses can appear normal while still shedding the virus, this is why preventative measures are so important.

Protecting your horse and our entire equine community is always my priority.

02/13/2026

Excited to announce I will be attending this incredible opportunity! Can't wait to share all that I learn 😁

01/29/2026

Life is good 😌

I'm finding my joy in bodywork again
finding an appetite for knowledge, and peace in patience.

Grateful for a life filled with horses ❤️

01/14/2026

Horses are really amazing and fascinating creatures but also can be so frustrating to manage. 🥲 I mostly keep mine naked and when I'm trying to make a decision on whether to blanket it's like a math equation of if I'm adding enough fill to compensate or not.

This post does a great job of explaining their thermoregulation system and the importance of knowing your horse to know when and how to blanket. I would love to see more research done on blanketing!

❄️ 𝐏𝐢𝐥𝐨𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧: 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐇𝐨𝐫𝐬𝐞’𝐬 𝐁𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐭-𝐈𝐧 𝐖𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐁𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐤𝐞𝐭 🐴

Time to bring back one of the very first topics I discussed on this page: piloerection. I write a lot about blanketing because it can be a great management tool when done well. But it’s also important to highlight how a horse naturally thermoregulates without human intervention!

When a mammal becomes cold, the goal is simple: conserve heat as efficiently as possible. This process begins with cold-sensitive thermoreceptors in the skin, which activate the sympathetic nervous system. That activation triggers the pilomotor reflex, similar to goosebumps in humans.

During this reflex, sympathetic nerves stimulate the arrector pili muscles to contract. These small smooth muscles attach the skin to the base of each hair follicle, and when they contract, the hair stands on end. This process, known as piloerection, allows air to be trapped between the hairs, creating an insulating layer that helps reduce heat loss.

I like to use a scuba diving analogy here. A wetsuit doesn’t keep you dry, instead, it traps a thin layer of water against your skin. Once that layer warms up, you’re no longer losing heat to fresh, cold water every second. Without it, your body would be trying (and failing) to warm an entire ocean.

Piloerection works the same way. By trapping a layer of air between the erect hairs, the horse’s skin isn’t constantly exposed to new cold air, which helps conserve body heat.

🌬️𝐖𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐬𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦 𝐢𝐬 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐞𝐝

Piloerection is effective, but it’s not foolproof. Wind and rain can significantly disrupt this process. Wind strips away the trapped air layer, and rain flattens the hair coat, preventing the hairs from standing up at all. This is likely why studies consistently show that horses seek shelter or prefer blankets during windy and wet conditions.

A wet hair coat is especially problematic. When the coat becomes saturated, the insulating air layer is lost, and water conducts heat away from the body far more efficiently than air. At that point, piloerection can’t function as intended, and heat loss increases rapidly.

🧣𝐁𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐤𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠, 𝐩𝐢𝐥𝐨𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐦𝐨𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞

Blanketing can absolutely support horses in challenging conditions, but it’s important to recognize that when a horse is blanketed, piloerection no longer occurs. Whether that’s because the horse is already warm enough or because the weight of the blanket physically interferes with hair elevation isn’t fully understood.

This has raised concerns about the use of uninsulated sheets in winter. While we don’t have a definitive answer yet, a pilot study I conducted two winters ago suggests moisture management may be the key issue. Sheets lack insulating fill that can absorb or buffer moisture generated beneath the blanket. As a result, damp air can become trapped against the coat and skin - and cold plus moisture is not a good combination.

In contrast, blankets with added fill can absorb some of this moisture, helping maintain a warmer, drier microclimate next to the horse’s body.

🧠𝐒𝐨 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐝𝐨𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐦𝐞𝐚𝐧 𝐢𝐧 𝐩𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐞?

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t blanket. It means that if you choose to blanket, the insulation provided must be equal to or greater than what the horse would achieve through piloerection alone. If that threshold isn’t met, we may actually be reducing thermal protection rather than improving it.

The challenge, of course, is that there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. Weather conditions, wind, precipitation, individual horse characteristics, hair coat, metabolic rate, and blanket weight all interact. That complexity is exactly why blanketing should be viewed as an active management decision, not a set-and-forget solution.

Next time you’re at the barn on a cold day, take a moment to watch an unblanketed horse and notice the subtle ways they work to stay warm. It’s a remarkable, and often overlooked, physiological process.

And if any blanketing companies out there want to collaborate on future research - you know where to find me!

Cheers,
Dr. DeBoer

06/05/2025

When switching feeds, protein and fat percentages are the least important things on the tag!

Here’s what I look at—in order of importance:

Ingredient List
Guaranteed Analysis
Feeding Directions

Let’s break it down:

1. Ingredient List
Are the ingredients clearly listed (e.g., beet pulp, alfalfa meal), or are they grouped under vague terms like “processed grain by-products”?
Collective terms = ingredient changes based on commodity prices.

2. Guaranteed Analysis
Only nutrients listed under the guaranteed analysis on the product tag (not just the website) are regulated and must be present at those levels—they’re testable and enforceable by law.

The more items guaranteed, the more nutritional quality the company is backing.
Marketing may promote “digestive support,” but unless ingredients like probiotics are in the guaranteed analysis, there’s no guarantee they’re viable post-manufacture (this is called tag dressing).
Note: Don’t compare nutrient levels without first comparing feeding rates—context matters!

3. Feeding Directions
These tell you how much to feed to meet the vitamin and mineral needs.

Example:
If a feed recommends 6 lbs/day for a 1000 lb horse and you’re feeding only 3 lbs, you’re delivering half the nutrition. Choosing a feed with a lower recommended feeding rate can be more cost-effective and appropriate.

A feed with a 3 lb/day rate vs. 6 lb/day dramatically affects both nutrition and cost. Lower feeding rates should have higher nutrient concentrations to make up the difference.

Organic Minerals
Organic forms (e.g., zinc methionine complex) are far more bioavailable than inorganic ones (e.g., zinc oxide).

Are organics listed before inorganics? If not, it may just be tag dressing. This is a deep topic, but placement matters!

03/26/2025

Wednesdays are my favorite because I love reading these small bits advice! Try this movement with your horse and see what they say 🐴

09/29/2024

This! 🤗

Why do biomechanics matter?

No one uttered this term to me, in all my years of riding and lesson-taking, until I was well into my 20's. I heard lots of other words: contact, responsiveness, connection, rhythm, impulsion, suppleness. All of them felt like these ethereal concepts that had multiple meanings depending on who you talked to. They also had varying degrees of importance or ranking in terms of what you need first before the horse can offer the next thing, depending on who you talked to. I still see this all the time, and hear about how frustrating it is from other horsepeople trying to do the best they can.

Biomechanics are the physical relationships and structural laws that govern how living things move. Biomechanics are the HOW in all of those aforementioned ethereal terms. They are vital in understanding how to correctly develop a horse for riding. This is the first reason why biomechanics matter.

The second reason is because horses weren't designed to be ridden. I cannot overstate how important this is to understand if you want to ride horses and ride them well: horses were NEVER designed to be sat on. The horse is born with a specific set of biomechanical tools available to him, and they serve him very well...when they are needed.

The thing is, those tools were designed for maximum efficiency if the horse's life is in danger: used for brief moments, blips in between long stretches of calm. Those exact tools can cause injury, unsoundness, and degeneration if used every day, day in and day out, for years.
. . . . . . . .

I want you to look at these two photos.

The top horse is using what nature gave him (and what work with humans helped him turn into long-standing patterns in movement). The bottom horse has been given new tools and taught how to use them to move in ways that preserve soundness, not encourage degeneration.

The top horse is moving in a way that directly ties into the same sympathetic nervous system responses that kick in when a horse is in danger. The bottom horse is demonstrating all of the power potential the nervous system makes available when the horse is in danger, but accessing it through relaxation and completely different biomechanics.

The top horse is using the ground to support his weight in movement, putting a lot of pressure on his joints. The bottom horse is doing a lot of that supporting himself by virtue of his posture, putting significantly less strain on his joints.

You may have already figured out this is the same horse. These photos were taken approximately two years apart.

I guess what I'm getting at is this: the way to develop the bottom horse isn't to simply take the top horse and add contact, impulsion, responsiveness, ride circle after circle, do pole and hill work, etc. Whatever you apply to the ridden horse will only reinforce what is already in him.

You must teach him, literally from the ground up, a new way of moving, a different biomechanical perspective. Some horses will come by this easier than others, but not a one is born knowing how to put all of these things together on their own when the human asks it. Not a one.

We have to show them how.

PC: Mandy Helwege. Thank you for permitting me to share your lovely boy.