Wednesday 5 January 2011

Joint research with farriers

An exciting new development is now going ahead - a joint research project with a group of farriers where we will run a comparison of hoof growth rates, hoof measurements, kinematics and force plate analysis.

This has been something I discussed way back in the summer with Mark Caldwell, but its taken a while to get the practicalities sorted out and then the weather has been very much against us over the last 2 months.

Now, though, snow permitting, the project should start in the next few weeks and it should be fascinating.  We will be using one barefoot and one shod group of horses, all of whom are working hard on Exmoor, and run a 3 month study into how their hooves perform and grow :-)  More on that soon!

5 comments:

cptrayes said...

hallelujah!!!!!
This is an amazing step forward.

WELL DONE NIC


C

Unknown said...

That's fantastic news! Looking forward to the results!

Nic Barker said...

Thanks guys - exciting stuff for the New Year, for sure :-)

jenj said...

Awesome! Quantitative data on that sort of stuff is exactly what's needed. Maybe it's not everything you want, but it's definitely a HUGE step in the right direction! How exciting!

AnnetteSC said...

Great news, and good on the farriers for getting involved!