Why treeless saddles are better than treed saddles for both rider and horse

Treed Saddles, Treeless Saddles, and Ansur®

At Ansur, our primary mission is to design all of our saddles to allow the horse's complete comfort and total freedom of movement. Though the art of saddle making is thousands of years old, prior to Ansur saddles, no one has been able to successfully build a saddle that can form itself to the constant bending, flexing, expanding and contracting of the horse's moving body AND at the same time protect its back.

With the benefits of modern technology, we have advanced the art of saddle construction to a previously impossible-to-obtain level. The result is the creation of a protective treeless saddle with all-directional flexibility on the back of a moving horse while providing a permanent supportive internal structure for you, the rider.

Ansur Saddlery Northwest, LLC is the only saddle company world-wide that can provide a patented fully-flexible treeless saddle that maintains its shape while protecting horse and rider, in motion, over years and years of use.


Unlike saddles with trees

The rigid tree was originally designed to hold the soldier and his gear and weapons in place during battle. Since the introduction of the tree, we have spent hundreds and hundreds of years trying to make a rigid wooden frame comfortable for the rider and tolerable for the horse.

Ansur Saddlery has replaced the fixed wooden, steel and sometimes plastic rigid frame with a permanent internal, totally flexible structure that is able to flex and bend with your horse. Our FlexCore foundation provides the horse with pain-free comfort and the ability to move his body with unrestricted freedom. Ansur treeless saddles eliminate the rigid framework of traditional saddles, allowing the horse to move more freely and naturally without a wooden clamp on its back.


Unlike other treeless saddles

As far as we know, we are the only saddle-making firm that actually has totally replaced the rigid structure within a saddle with a fully-flexible protective one. Note the operative term, "structure." We have not simply removed the bars leaving the rigid pommel and cantle; we have not removed all rigid pieces and replaced it with an all-fabric piece of equipment that has no retainable structure to it. We have not put together soft foam and felt parts with Velcro and called it a saddle. We have completely replaced the rigid saddle tree with a totally non-rigid internal structure.

No other treeless saddle manufacturer is able to offer our patented, FlexCore internal structure and TraumaSystem. Our Ansur treeless saddles are fully flexible, totally durable and provide the "best of the best": protecting horses' backs, allowing them to move naturally without discomfort while comfortably supporting their riders.

Not only does a horse's back shape change during the course of a year; back dimensions also differ before and immediately after exercise.

Dr. Sue Dyson, Animal Health Trust, presenting at the International Conference: "Horses, Saddle, and Riders: Applying the Science"


Ansur's Patented Technology: the Flexcore Foundation

Exclusive to Ansur, the FlexCore Foundation is the most important concept for our treeless saddle models. Consisting of two parts, the core structure and the trauma system, the FlexCore is the substantial, semi-firm but flexible-in-all-directions foundation upon which the finished treeless saddle is built.

Key components include two halves of the saddle body, on top of which is placed an injection-molded polyurethane (flexible, resiliant) pommel and cantle. These are sculpted and shaped to provide a specific seat shape and size for each treeless saddle.

In between and partially overlaying the pommel and cantle, are cross-layers of cross‐linked polymers and shock-absorbing materials that were originally developed by the space and sports industries. These create the trauma or shock-absorbing TraumaSystem which protects the horse’s back, distributes the rider’s weight throughout the saddle and provides a highly comfortable ride for the rider.

Ansur saddles built on FlexCore: the comfort of a treeless saddle with all the rider support of a tree