What is cross-canter?

Hi! You are never silly for not knowing something! And the best thing to do is exactly what you are doing right now, asking! Just keep it up! 🙂

Cross-canter, or disunited canter, means the horse is on one canter lead behind, say the right, and the other lead in front, here the left. Instead of the diagonal pair landing together, the legs on the same side land together. In right canter the footfall is LH then RH and LF then RF; in a cross-canter that starts on the left hind it becomes LH then RH and RF then LF.

It happens because the horse is slightly out of balance. Most often it corrects itself when the horse changes the canter behind.

You sometimes see it in jumping horses after a fence.

In Icelandic horses with a lot of pace, it is not unusual for them to run a long stretch in cross-canter, which is very uncomfortable to ride. It can also happen when an Icelandic horse in pace becomes too four-beat and falls onto the forehand, breaking into cross-canter, and that is something you want to avoid.

I hope that gives you a better understanding of what cross-canter is, and that it is something we do not want the horse to do.