Loading and sole depth

These are photos of another rehab horse, this time Bobby, who arrived with very thin soles but is growing much better depth of foot.

If you look at the distance between the nail holes and the coronet when he was shod, and compare that now, you can see how much hoof has grown and how much more protection he now has between himself and the ground.

Unfortunately, when Bobby arrived he'd just had an abscess caused by a nail, and although he seemed to have recovered from it, the problem resurfaced again, and he has just had another abscess in the same area - just to the lateral side of the red bruise you can see on his toe.

All this means he has done relatively little mileage here - which makes his reasonably fast hoof growth all the more impressive - but I am hoping Easter will be the start of much better things for Bobby!

You can already see, from the middle photo, how his hooves are loading differently than they were in shoes. What you can't see from these photos is that the biceps brachii muscles on the lateral side of both front limbs are very over-developed, probably as a result of trying to stop himself from collapsing medially. It will be interesting to see whether these also change as his hoof loading improves.