Wednesday 23 June 2010

More pages, more horse info

I am a bit slow on the uptake with the old technology, though swapping to a Mac has helped no end, but its taken me till now to work out that you can have extra info on yer blog...I only realised because I saw some other blogs which had nifty additional pages across the top, but it took a couple of days before I mastered how you put them there.... :-0

So now, there are some handy little tabs at the top of the blog where I've put info about our own horses and the rehab horses, so that if you come across a name you can check out the horse's potted history, plus pics and links to film clips. I've only put up details about a selected few past rehabs at the moment, but will add to the list as we go along - I hope you find it interesting!

2 comments:

Deered said...

I've just found you blog and read back through it - I wish some of this info had been around in the early 90's in NZ. I had a couple of horses that we ended up shoeing because they wore their feet down too fast, and another one that just kept taking huge chips off her feet. (we were also treating seedy toe in that one and she had a few other issues.) Both went without shoes if they were turned out, and being kept in the "good paddock" which was the one without large amounts of stones - but it would have been interesting to see how they would have done with good barefoot work.
I have one question about what was done with one of my horses - when I got her (17hh (possibly a bit more ex racehorse) she had very long toes (hadn't seen a farrier for over 8 months) and terrible seedy toe and some craks up to the coronet band with a seedy toe infection in them. As her toes were so long, and she had pin firing/blistering scars on both front tendons the farrier didn't want to do a dramatic change in the length of her toes to avoid too much change on her tendons. Is that standard practice or do most people go to a "normal" hoof immediately?

Nic Barker said...

Thanks for your kind words :-)

In answer to your tendon question, it depends(!)...In your horse's case it may well have been the right thing to do. Many of the horses who come here though arrive with DDFT injuries, and those are actually caused, in many cases, but a toe first landing, which a long toe encourages.

So with the horses here, long toes are usually part of the problem, and shortening them only helps.

Any trim has got to be done on a case-by-case basis, though, and often, as you say, gradual change is best.