hooves-blog

[hooves-blog]

Stepped out of my comfort zone today and took on a big (metal) project. glued on a vet prescribed open toe heart bar with a reversed Sigafoos Series III cuff for a horse with a large subsolar and toe abscess with sole penetration after two bouts of laminitis. he has almost no frog (lost it with the abscess) and only part of the sole has keratinized. decided to boot over the shoe instead of hospital plate since the toe is also wide open and for ease of cleaning for older owner. will probably shorten the heart bar next cycle when he has more frog to prevent too much pressure. hoping after that we can switch to just a reverse shoe and cut away the remaining detached wall at the toe as it comes down. other hoof got a urethane clog nailed and cast on to help with weight-bearing associated laminitis. in the beginning this horse was so lame, it was originally thought he had broken his pelvis. he felt pretty good after, so we’re hopeful!

[hooves-blog]

“How far can/would you go to make a foot look shorter/more upright from the top? While I’m familiar with the concept of top dressing, domed dorsal walls, removing distortion, addressing a dished toe etc I could never wrap my head around taking lots of dorsal wall off to make a toe look shorter and to make a foot look “better angled”, especially to please an owner/vet/trainer.

At the end we don’t change angles of P3 - and could take care of too much toe leverage with other techniques without messing around with the integrity of the hoof capsule, especially in a not too perfect environment: setting shoe back and dome or champfer, rocker toe, rolled toe... “

sigh......

[hooves-blog]

Had to stop in the middle of a trim to show y'all this. The back of the foot is a bit weak from our wet weather, but would you look at the wall quality on this (wait for it…….) THOROUGHBRED mare. Absolutely beautiful pigmented- to- unpigmented ratio and sound to boot. Second image just shows the bottom after it was shaped to the proper balance before addressing the top.

[hooves-blog]

The tiniest 😍

[hooves-blog]

Hey! So I saw you recommended glue on shoes, and I thought I'd tell you that a study done on glue on shoes found that they are actually worse for the hoof as the constrict the heel movement whereas nail on shoes allow the heel to expand and contract

Oh! I didn’t know that, I thought they were better!

[hooves-blog]

Detailing bars

First photo: untrimmed and neglect bars folded over the sole

Second photo: defined bars in their correct location

To define bars take the curl of your hoof knife and, starting at the point where the heels turn and become the bars, take small slivers of bar away until you can just see the bar’s white line. A little at a time remove all excess bar until it is a straight line from heel purchase to midway down the frog and is flush with the sole. If the bar has grown significantly out over to sole or smeared into the sole, remove it down to true sole level. In the case of this horse, the bar had grown over chalky, exfoliating sole, so it was very obvious where bar ended and sole began. Look closely at the tubules. Bar tubules are “lines”, sole tubules are “dots.” Bar material is the same as hoof wall. Tap of various areas of the foot with your pick or knife and see if you can sense the difference.

I’ll try to get a video up of defining the bars, but this will have to do for now!

[hooves-blog]

oh noooo good TB feet. what ever will we do?

[hooves-blog]

To give a bit of back ground on cases like this, base narrow in the hind legs is a conformation that causes a horse to stand closer at the hooves than at the origin of the legs at the hips.  Often times a heavy muscled horse will suffer from this disability. Having base narrow hind legs cause hooves to wing in, so the horse is more likely to interfere.  A horse with this type of confirmation can’t develop speed for rapid acceleration.  The horse would also suffer from excessive stress and pressure on the outside of the hocks, fetlocks and hooves.  This can lead to degenerative joint disease, ligament strain, hoof bruising and quarter cracks, therefore, it must be remedied.   In the case we have here, the horse had base narrow confirmation in the hind legs.  We applied Super Fast  to create a lateral extension, which helped align the hocks.

Source

[hooves-blog]

Let’s see some cute mini feet for a change, eh?

[hooves-blog]

“This is an 8wk old quarter horse with a valgus angular deviation at the knee and a slightly varus fetlock. The medial plates are growing faster than the lateral which is pushing the leg toward the lateral side, causing abnormal weight bearing on the medial heel. We applied a medial Super Fast extension. Learned something important on this one. The vet asked if we poured alcohol on the Super Fast surface if it would dissipate heat faster…did a quick bench test and it almost immediately reduced the exotherm by 8-10 degrees (we had a meter). We did this on the foot after the Super Fast set for 1 minute. Seems like this might be a viable method when heat is a factor…like middle of summer or on sensitive areas.” -Vettec

[hooves-blog]

Can a horse regrow its entire hoof capsule? In this case, yes! More info at the source

[hooves-blog]

Half-day old baby feet, for your viewing pleasure.

@barefoothooves

[hooves-blog]

Arabian/Morgan gelding that definitely needed a trim but had amazing wall quality. The bright white inner wall, which is incredibly small here, is more susceptible to disease because of tubule shape and density. If the wall quality was poor this hoof would have been far more distorted than it currently is. This foot will turn around quickly.

[hooves-blog]

Some markups for a new client today. This horse was trimmed aggressively in the toe by another farrier four weeks ago, but the heels and bars were left quite tall and the severe thrush and white line disease left untreated. The hoof wall from quarter to quarter is completely detached from a significant bacterial/fungal infection. The wall itself bends under pressure, as there is a large open cavity just underneath it. Unfortunately the owner is now quite worried about any trimming happening at the toe, so they’ll be getting these, along with soaking and cleaning instructions, to help them understand why a resection is necessary.

[hooves-blog]

A client of mine got a mini horse named Itsy Bitsy. She has the cutest feet! 😍

[hooves-blog]

towards a gentle academic

be up front and honest about the things you do not know

acknowledge the intrinsic value of others’ knowledge bases, even if they do not seem important to you from your institutional context

do not feign mastery where you have none

respect the gaps in others’ knowledge bases

be generous, not only with others

but also with yourself

you overwork yourself at the risk of legitimizing a culture of overwork 

privilege voices and perspectives that have historically been left out of the academy

nothing is ever neutral or apolitical

support the progress of other scholars

collaboration over competition

[hooves-blog]

Hey hoof nerds!

Check this out: Brego’s Hoof Wall Resection

WARNING: Graphic pictures. Do not continue if you don’t want to see. Brego had his hoof wall resection yesterday. According to my vet, it was NBD for Brego (of course, he had good drugs on board and lots of people taking care of him). For me, it was super nerve-wracking - I was so worried they would get in there and find something really bad. Plus, I wasn’t there for it, so I had to wait for updates as my vet could send them. The procedure went off with no problem. He got a special set of custom shoes for support, and then they started removing the hoof wall. As they started digging, they discovered that the entire hoof wall, all the way down, was dead - there was no connection to the laminae underneath. When they got to the top of the hoof, they didn’t find a keratoma, but instead a pocket of damaged and infected cells. That area got cleaned and debrided until nothing but healthy cells were left.

The theory that the vets (there were four in attendance) and the farrier have is that years ago, Brego either had some tiny bit of infection or foreign body travel up from the toe all the way to the coronary band, or he had some slight damage to the coronary band. He blew out an abscess in exactly the same spot almost two years before we got him, so this whole thing probably started back then. He then went two years with no abscess, blew one out last spring, then went ANOTHER year with no abscess, then six months, and then it really became a problem this year. But, guy has been walking around with a compromised hoof for quite some time, and he’s so stoic that nobody even suspected. As for recovery, the plan is a little up in the air. He’s staying at the hospital for the next week, and right now his hoof is just wrapped with daily bandage changes. We may continue with daily changes once he comes home, or we may put a hoof cast on him. He’ll definitely be on stall rest or in a very small paddock for a while, but whether that is weeks or months we won’t know until we see how he progresses. Once we are sure the hoof is growing back in normally, the vet wants him to get as much (careful) movement as possible since movement helps the hoof grow. Total time to grow an entirely new hoof is 9-12 months, but he should be able to return to at least light work long before that. So, please keep your fingers crossed for an uncomplicated recovery and a beautiful, perfect new hoof! And now the moment you’ve all been waiting for… the gory pics. Seriously, if you don’t do blood, please don’t look.

Keep reading