Thursday 16 October 2008

The hoof rehab timeline...

Erik has now been with is for 3 weeks, and is an absolute sweetheart. His owner came up to see him today, and he was really pleased to see her - he knows full well he is her special boy :-)

He is making good progress, but it is still early days for him, and although he has gone from a pronounced toe first landing to flat or heel first landing (albeit no consistently), there are still lots of surfaces he finds challenging, so its definitely grass or pea gravel which are his preferred terrain!

At times like this, its invaluable to have other horses ar different stages - almost a timeline of how hoof rehabilitation goes. So at the moment we have Erik, newly out of shoes and with little new growth, and only just starting to land correctly; by contrast Bill has a whole hoof capsule, and lands heel first but still struggles on hard uneven ground or sharp turns due to the bony changes in his hoof, which will take more than one hoof capsule to improve. Contrast again Hector, who has over half a new hoof capsule but is much more capable than Bill because as a younger horse, his problems were more due to soft tissue damage than bone damage, and so have improved extremely quickly.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Brilliant to hear that Eric is doing so well. He was such a lovely gentleman, and a pleasure to him a couple of weeks ago. Let's hope the improvement continues at this rate for him.
Bruce