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<< Tom,
Then what does this say about a horse than naturally wears the back
feet square? Should the shoer keep the shape, or round the toe
slightly?
My Arab/Walker mare wore her back feet almost completely square
this winter, when I pulled shoes. Though the toes went off,
overall, the foot was not short.
When shod with a round toe in the back last year, she often shuffled
or dragged her back feet. With the square toe, she doesn't. (Of
course this may be breed related!)
Any comments appreciated!
Karen
>>
Karen,
Your point is well-taken. I should have also mentioned that we exercised our
horses barefoot for months, hundreds of miles, before we ever started fooling
around with shoes. The whole idea is to allow the horse, with his own
conformational problems, to come to a natural balance before we start
bumbling around. Here is the answer to every horse question ever asked: "WHAT
WORKS IS REAL."
The point is that there will be some general guidelines as to what to do when
a problem occurs, and other guidelines as to the problems that will occur
because of the solution you've applied to the first problem. Therefore, no
matter how out-of-line something looks, if it's working well for the horse,
leave it alone!!!!
I'll give you an example. We have these high speed treadmills and slomo
videos that allow ust to go crazy with hoof balancing. In one case, we had a
paddler--and the usual solution to a paddler is to rebalance the foot--taking
some off the outside. In this case that action doubled the problem.
Astonished, I sent the video to Ric Redden. He reported back that I was
trying to solve a knee problem by treating the hoof. The conformational
defect was out of range of the trimming knife. Should have left well enough
alone.
ti
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