Criollo Horse - Endurance

Endurance

The breeders implemented rigorous endurance tests to help evaluate horses for breeding. In these events known as "La Marcha", the horses ride over a 750 km (466 mi) course to be completed in a 75 hours split in 14 days. No supplemental feed is allowed. The horses are required to carry heavy loads of 245 lb (110 kg) on their backs and may only eat the grass at the side of the road. At the end of the day, a veterinarian checks the horses.

Today, the horse is used mainly as a working-cow horse, but it is also considered a pleasure and trail horse which contributed a great deal to the Argentine polo pony They are also excellent rodeo and endurance horses. The national rodeo competition is known as "paleteada", and it involves a paired team of horses and riders that approach a steer from both sides at a full run. The steer is sandwiched in between the two horses that lean onto the bovine, practically carrying it down a 60 m long delineated path beyond which the horses must not go during the defined trajectory. It is an amazing demonstration of control that can literally pick up a steer and place it wherever it needs to be.

One example of the breed's fantastic endurance was the ride made by the Swiss-born Argentine rider Professor Aimé Félix Tschiffely (1894–1954) between 1925-28. Tschiffely took two crioulos, 16-year-old Mancha and 15-year-old Gato, on a 13,350 mile (21,500 km) trek from Buenos Aires to Manhattan, New York, crossing snow-capped mountains, the world's driest desert, the thickest tropical jungles, riding in all types of weather. Alternating the riding and packing between the two horses, the trio took three years to finish the trip. Although Prof. Tschiffely went through many hardships on the trip, including a bout of malaria, from the Pampas across La Quiaca, from La Paz, to Cuzco, Lima, Trujillo, Quito, Medellin and Cartagena. They rode up to 5,900 metres above sea level, through Passo El Cóndor, between Potosi and Chaliapata, (Bolivia), the horses did wonderfully well in a wide array of extreme topographies and climates. Gato lived to be 36 and Mancha, 40. They lived the last years of their lives as celebrities in La estancia El Cardal (El Cardal Ranch), the breeding establishment of the man most credited for developing the crioulo breed, Dr. Emilio Solanet.

In 1987, Jorge Saenz Rosas, owner of the Argentine Estancia Cristiano Muerto, offered his criollo Sufridor to the American Louis Bruhnke and the Russian-French Vladimir Fissenko for a horseback ride from the Beagle Channel in Tierra del Fuego up to the shores of the Arctic Ocean in Deadhorse, Alaska. After traveling for five and a half years, the ride was accomplished in the summer of 1993. Having made the entire journey, the Criollo Sufridor is likely the horse that has traveled the furthest in a single direction. The ride was chronicled in the book Sufridor, Emece (2000), written by Louis Bruhnke.