We have been watching the number of comments on Facebook about the price of the Freedom Girth.
We realise that it is not cheap by any shape of the imagination but then rarely is anything inexpensive when it is cutting edge, technologically advanced and uses nothing but the best materials to produce the finished product whatever it might be.
In these trying times we also understand that economically people have other priorities that are more important to them than a new girth.
But it got us to thinking and putting this in real terms.
What price is the comfort of your horse? It is an open question and there is no right or wrong answer. For us here at the Centre Line it is of paramount importance, we only carry products that improve either our horse’s performance and comfort or our own.
Often in this world, we don’t know what we don’t know until we do. This was true for us about girths until we were educated by the people at Scharf. The technology and research behind this girth is staggering, each component has been thought through with infinite detail. The attention to detail is staggering. It is produced in Europe to exacting standards using only the best leathers and polymers that money can buy, using highly skilled craftspeople to deliver a perfect product.
Do we think twice about buying a saddle for £800? £1500? £3000? £4000? Or more? The answer is that we each have our own price bracket and buy the best that we possible can, that is fitted by master saddlers to fit our horses as perfectly as possible but that is still only roughly 50% of the horse, the other 50% is the girth.
Would you run a marathon in jeans and a tight belt? Or in running shorts? Crazy question right, but you can draw the parallel to what the girth is doing to our horses every day. We may have “anatomically” correct girths but they are not biomechanically correct, combining the two together is the answer to the providing our horses with the comfort they deserve.
What we don’t often really understand is how critical the girth is to gaining the benefit from the substantial investment we have made in our saddle! Nor how comfortable we can make our horse.
So to PRICE.
A dressage girth is £275.
This kind of puts it into perspective after all a girth covers nearly 50% of the circumference of a horse.
It is also responsible for saddle issues, physical issues, comfort issues and performance issues.
Put another way, if you ride 6 days a week, 50 weeks of the year it will cost you 91 pence a ride.
