Tuesday 5 June 2012

Roo's hooves

Roo has been here just over 3 weeks and is already making some good changes to her hooves. This is already a foot with improving balance. 
Her lameness is mild and although her medio-lateral balance is changing quite significantly, she was already landing heel first which gives her a head-start. 
Here are her sole shots - she had fairly healthy frogs in shoes and had been sympathetically shod but these photos clearly demonstrate the difference in frog and sole engagement in a barefoot as opposed to shod horse.
Caudal hoof shots confirm the same, this time of the RF. She is also growing a hoof capsule at a different angle  - you can already feel it but it won't be visible to photo for a few more weeks.
As always, looks at the length of the hoof wall in the shod photo by comparison with today and looking at that you can also clearly see the distortion in the wall. That's something which should continue to get better over the next few weeks. 

4 comments:

Kristen Eleni Shellenbarger said...

Wow, I can see how her hoof tubules were growing forward and are now working their way back where they are better supporting her! That's awesome.
I'm sure you have, but the horses that come to you shod, and then go bare, that land toe first..how long did it take them to get to heel first landing? I am sure it's different in each case, but just wondering what you see. :)

Kristen Eleni Shellenbarger said...

Of course I ask b/c it's what we are currently working on ;)

Nic Barker said...

Kristen, if you search for any of the rehab horses you will find their video footage or go to the Vimeo page (linked on the right) and you can see them all laid out with the dates each clip was taken.

As a rule, horses landing toe first take anything from 2-8 weeks to start landing correctly, depending on how bad the injury/damage to the feet is.

Kristen Eleni Shellenbarger said...

Thanks Nic :)