Hooves

Here in France NBS, 4-point, square-toe, or whatever you like to call it is VERY new. I have a great farrier who has been working with me for 12 years. He is young, competent and interested in trying new ideas. He shoes a lot of competition horses, the endurance horses being in the minority.

In 12 years I've NEVER had a lameness due to shoeing and we very rarely lose shoes. He takes great care with the youngsters and I think takes almost as much pleasure as I do in seeing them through from their first trim until they have their first set of shoes.

We are in the process of "trying" the NBS method. Eric has been on a Gene Ovenick course and I have a girl-friend in UK whose boss is one of the pioneers of NBS in UK. Her arabian is shod NBS. I've seen the video and I think my farrier and I have a good basic understanding of NBS principles. (OK, OK, I'll get to the point in a second........)

Our first NBS-shod mare, Pearl, (7rs arabian) has a very "daisy-cutting" stride and stumbled a fair bit, mainly due to being idle and not very physically mature. She has had above-the-knee suspensory problems which hopefully are now over but I felt that NBS could help her as my vet said that she absolutely shouldn't get long in the toe.

When she was first shod she felt "funny" for a while. Once she adapted she was much better, more balanced and seemed to find it easier to use her back-end. She is on her 2nd set of NBS shoes. By the way Eric is forging his own NBS shoes using his understanding of the principles.

We shod a second mare, Nayla, 2 weeks ago. This is a 10 yr old mare who has only recently started endurance. She completed 2 40kms rides at the back end of last season with no probs. She is a bit long in the pasterns so again I thought perhaps NBS could help.

She was shod 10 days ago. Again, like Pearl, a short period of adaption and then she seemed to settle in to her new shoes. However, I have noticed that after each period of work her pasterns & fetlocks are filled (stocked-up??). The filling goes away during the day when she is turned out but comes back overnight, more if she works, less if she has a day off. Her work-load has not changed and it is obvious from her hr that she is not stressed. Her diet, like all of mine, is forage based with grain/cereal balancer according to work.

I've noticed that Pearl as well has very slight stocking-up. You really need to know her to notice, its very slight, just the suspicion of puffiness around the fetlock joints.

So what do you think? I feel that for whatever reason the way we have shod them is causing the stocking-up. I have talked about it with Eric and we agreed to go another 10 days until he next visits before making a decision. If in doubt we will re-shoe them as before. Perhaps we're not interpreting the principles correctly, or perhaps as I read in an article the approach is too radical.

I have read a couple of posts, plus an article on Nelson's web-site, talking about a less radical method of improving the breakover with "roll-over" shoes. I presume this means no toe-clip and the toes rolled.

Anyway, sorry this is so long but I needed to set the scene and would welcome any comments as you've all got more experience of NBS than we do. Somebody in a recent post made the point that NBS is fine but you have to look at the limb formation and this such an obvious point but I wonder if perhaps this is where I am going wrong with Nayla as her forelimb conformation is not perfect.

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