Hooves and symmetry - a Friday photo

Here's a photo for you as a follow-up to the posts I put up recently about hooves, symmetry and limb loading - these are the earlier posts http://rockleyfarm.blogspot.com/2011/02/hooves-and-symmetry.html and http://rockleyfarm.blogspot.com/2011/02/wonky-feet-at-work.html.

This is Felix, the only one of my own horses who is "normal" :-)  All the others had long term lameness problems in shoes, which is one of the reasons (I suspect) that several of them now have hoof asymmetry.

In this photo, he is not standing perfectly square, nor is he on a perfectly level surface, but nevertheless you can see that a "plumbline" down his limb to the hoof capsule demonstrates that his hooves are loading evenly.  I will try and come up with a better photo sometime but time is short at the moment, and for now this will have to do :-)

For reference, here are his hooves - evenly loaded and fairly symmetrical - in fact, very nice feet.