Thursday 24 March 2011

Dilly's hooves

Dilly is the eldest of the current rehab horses, but that hasn't stopped her from being in a rush to improve her hooves.  She changed her landing rapidly, but subsequently had a bit of a setback - perhaps because her enthusiasm got the better of her.  

She has made good progress over the last 2 weeks, though, and the photos show more clearly what has been happening. 
Here is her LF on the day she arrived.  A nice hoof with generally good proportions, reasonably good heels and lots to like.  Despite that she was toe first landing and had been diagnosed with navicular problems in both front feet.
But look at the same hoof 4 weeks later - an even better frog, more supportive heels, and more strength to the back of the hoof.   Her landing has been better for a week or more and it shows.

Another huge improvement over the last couple of weeks has been that - although Dilly still loves Oscar (of course)  - she is now happy and relaxed without him.  She will hang out with other horses (yesterday Felix, Charlie and Angel were her boys) and will work happily in the school or out on exercise on her own, which is really lovely to see.

Oscar naturally still welcomes her back on her return, but he is equally happy hanging out with Patsy... or Lucy... or Bailey... (think he has a  bit of a grey mare theme going on at the moment...) so its nice that Dilly has some toy boys :-)

1 comment:

jenj said...

Do you ever measure the frog to determine percent change or increase in surface area? If you're looking for hard numbers, that might be a useful measure to have.