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About those feet
Time heals all things...

Maybe, maybe not.  Jury's still out on this one.

To lend credibility to this notion, when I struck out on my own, I found two references that indicated the less you mess with horses' feet, the better!

One was in an ancient veterinary manual, something I imagined written in foggy England in the days of the carriage.  The advice there, after several pages of what to do in increasingly more bizarre situations, was something along the line of: "If none of this works, pull the shoes and put the horse to pasture for three months."

(Which, you kind of wonder, if that's what corrects it, why isn't that part of horse keeping?)

The second reference was a more recent cowboy type.  By recent, this could've been someone working cattle in the 50's.  His take was that, "Come summer, we always pulled the shoes and turned them loose.  By the time we were ready to start up again in the Fall, everything was sorted out."  I vaguely recall this was prefaced with something along the lines of 'if we had a horse whose feet seemed to be getting out of alignment.'   I'm also started to question the whole Summer-Fall timeline.  Wouldn't you be working in the Summer?  Maybe it was Winter-Spring?  ANYWAY - the idea is, you give the horse time off.  You don't ride it.  You don't mess with it's feet.  You let it be a horse.  And it gets better that way.

With the introduction of Paddock Paradise there are also now many stories of horses being kept this way who, within perhaps a year, have stellar feet.  

The key to these three scenarios may well be there is usually some patch of rough ground which serves as an emory board of sorts.   The parts of the hoof coming into contact the most with the ground will provide the most support and release to the body and will also be the most worn down.  This way the horse is self-correcting skeletal and muscular issues at the same speed with which the hoof is remodeling. 

And, with my own crew, I have had very good success recovering from 'traditional farriery.'   And some of what we've come back from was rather horrible.  I didn't take pictures because I was so ashamed I'd let that happen.  Also, because I didn't know if, really, it could get better. (Mind you, I hired very expensive farriers!)(Don't ask me how they got off in the weeds.)

So here comes Mia.  Mia came to me with 'arthritis in her front foot.'  

And looking at her, I was thinking, there's something mighty strange with that backend, too.

And from here I could easily segue off into like a thousand different topics!  None of this happens in a vacuum.  There is a feedback loop between the skeleton, muscles, tendons, and hooves.  

To keep to this topic, we pulled the (front) shoes.  All hooves showed adaptations.  (AKA none of the hooves were normal.)   Both front feet were 'driftwood.'  This means that they weren't well oxygenated and weren't growing vigorously.  (As a quick aside, this means there wasn't any real circulation going on in the foot -- something with health consequences on many levels with the impact to hoof growth being the key to this topic.)  The hoof wall was weak and a bit shredded from the nails.  (She did have clips.)  So it looked a bit dicey from the gitgo.  Whoever had done the shoes before, I could understand what they were doing and it wasn't a half bad thing, but I wanted more.  I wanted healthy feet.  And I want to see about getting rid of that arthritis.

To date -- we had several weeks of her usual movement.  Then we had a week of wonderful movement.  Then I walked out to the barn one morning to see a horse that wasn't walking at all.   PANIC.  

Since then she's not been ridden, no lunging, no round pen.  I'm doing some myofascial release along with the Ortho-Bionomy/Equine Positional Release. (I'll do a different post to cover that!)  I have also utilized Vettec Equi-Pac and randomly slid a foam pad under various feet.  

We've had some good weeks, some bad days, a few more whiffs of PANIC.  This is not for the faint of heart!  

Counting on my fingers, she's been here for four months, although the shoes didn't get pulled right away.  Truthfully, that's depressing!  

The good news, though, is that her feet *are* remodeling into a much healthier shape and the thicker hoof wall is making it's way down to the ground.  I suspect we won't make serious headway until the new growth starts connecting with the ground.  Which, that may be another half year of so.  Time to 'dig in' for the long haul.  Time for practicing patience.  And persistence.  We'll get there, though.

When you're driving through hell, keep going!

L

 

Are you looking for something more in your riding?  Something that really connects the inside and the outside?
I've studied horse and human anatomy for twenty five years.  I started with Centered Riding and that is solidly based upon how bodies work and how brains process information.  I know Alexander, Feldenkrais, Trigger Point, myofascial, Ortho-bionomy, and more recently how to develop resistance training programs.  I've done yoga for more than forty years, studied (and used) the chakra and meridian systems for over twenty.  Sometimes I don't go into theory because in the middle of a lesson it would detract from the practical learning of how to ride, but I do clinics where I share this information along with how to incorporate it into your training program.  And if you really don't mind listening to me yak forever, I can easily do that during a lesson, too.  It's just most folks want to ride!  

Books: Amazon Assoc. / Old Favs

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"The greatest achievement was at first and for a time a dream. The oak sleeps in the acorn, the bird waits in the egg, and in the highest vision of the soul a waking angel stirs. Dreams are the seedlings of realities." 

~ James Allen