I keep mentioning the shuffle throughout my website, and thought you might like to find out what it is.

The simple answer is that it is an “easy middle gait” – a variation on the gait between a walk and a canter, where many horses will pick up a trot. Of course the more useful answer is much longer. Appaloosa websites often mention the shuffle, but do not describe it, at least not in a way that I could understand. I hope this article will be helpful to you.

There is a spectrum of middle gait, from the purely diagonal trot to the purely lateral pace. In the trot, the left front and right hind feet (diagonal pair) move up and forward and land at the same time, followed by the right front and left hind (the other diagonal pair.) The rider feels each diagonal pair as they land, many will “post” (or momentarily rise out of the saddle) every other stride to avoid the bounce. In the pace, the left front and left rear (lateral pair) will move up and forward to land in unison, followed by the right front and right rear (the other lateral pair). Although the pace is favored in some forms of harness racing, very few riders are able to ride the pace comfortably, as the pace will fling you side-to-side with each jarring stride.

The “easy middle gaits” fall somewhere between the trot and the pace. Many far more experienced and observant people than me have written about the easy gaits and how they are related to or differ from one another (Lee Ziegler has a wonderful book, and you can attend clinics or buy videos from Liz Graves, both of whom work with the horse’s natural abilities.) I will only talk about the “shuffle” today.

The shuffle is a nearly diagonal gait. Unlike a trot, where the diagonal pair lands at the same time, the hind hoof lands a tiny bit later and slides into place after the front hoof is planted, then the other diagonal pair advances in the same manner. The result you feel from the saddle? No jarring! The sliding action of hind feet minimizes or eliminates the jolt of landing experienced in a trot. The result from the ground? They look like they are trotting (that little delay is too fast to see), but you can see more dust come up from the hind feet since they are sliding into place. You can hear the difference too, the cowboys used to call it out “SOP-n-TA-ers”; you can hear a little more emphasis when the fronts land. To really see what is going on requires being able to video the moving horse and then to view the frames slowly or even one at a time.

Sometimes called a “broken trot”, “single foot”, or some other name depending on what part of the country you’re in, it seems to be very close to the original “fox trot”. Have any of you seen a fox in motion? It travels pretty much like a dog or a cat, nothing very exotic. A theory I read that sounds very plausible is that the name “fox trot” came from a mispronunciation of the French “faux trot” (should be pronounced like “foe trot”), which means “false trot”. As one of my Missouri Fox-trotter friends points out, not all Missouri Fox-trotters do the floppy-eared head-nodding that is the official breed standard, some do it the way my shuffling horses do it. So it seems fair to say that the shuffle is very close to a fox trot.

Gait is a product of several things: the horse’s nervous system, body position, and conformation. We can train the nervous system, we can adjust the horse’s body position, but we cannot change the horse’s conformation. We breed our horses to have a conformation that enables them to perform an easy middle gait as a natural matter of course.