Good grief!

...read this quote and its yet again brought home the enormous depth of ignorance that is out there...

"Shoes are essential for the performance horse not only to protect the hoof but also to preserve the

hoof complex and the structures contained within the hoof capsule during the rigors of

competition."

The really depressing statistic is yet to come - this is from a paper that was presented to an American equine veterinary conference only a few months ago.

I haven't read all the papers yet, but there were 16 in total, of which 2 were devoted to "correct" shoeing and 5 were devoted to managing pain or analgesia in the lame horse....

A slightly better quote came from one of the farriers' papers':

"therapeutic shoeing is a modality for treatment of the unhealthy foot generally showing structural damage and the long-term goal is to improve the foot for that individual horse and achieve soundness. "

Even so, I sometimes feel as if I am in a parallel universe - hoof health is REALLY not as complicated as they would like to make out...