Monday 16 May 2011

Saffy - hooves day one

The other new arrival is Saffy, a 7 year old KWPN mare.  She has a fairly typical history for a rehab horse of intermittent lameness which gets worse with work, and on MRI she has collateral ligament damage in both front feet but worse in the LF (the white foot below)
Box rest and remedial farriery with roller shoes hadn't improved her and even in light work she was going lame.
RF - her hooves are long as I'd asked for them not to be trimmed just before she arrived.  She has been shod previously, as you can see from the old nail holes, but has been out of shoes for a few weeks.
This is the worse (LF) hoof on MRI and is the limb she is lamest on
From behind, there is a clear difference between medial and lateral sides of the hoof.

Interestingly, on her video footage her landing is worse on the RF, rather than the LF, possibly because she has been overloading the RF previously.

Saffy from Nic Barker on Vimeo.

3 comments:

jenj said...

My goodness what a beautiful girl! I hope her feet work themselves out quickly.

In your experience, what causes the vertical cracks in the hoof wall, especially on the LF?

Lucie said...

I'd be interested to know what might cause those vertical cracks to :)

Nic Barker said...

Hi both,

You get these lines often visible on white feet - I'm not calling them cracks in this case because they are superficial. I'm never sure whether they are just another thing you can see in white feet but not in black - if you look at Flynn's hooves (below) you can see the same faint lines but they are much less conspicuous on a dark hoof wall.