Apologies to Eager's owner, Nicola, who has had to wait til now for her photos even though she arrived at the weekend.
Eager is only 5 and has, as far as we know, never been shod so she has pretty nice feet - a much better frog and digital cushion than I normally see in horses on arrival and fairly strong hooves.
You could look at photos and conclude that she doesn't have a thing to worry about where her feet are concerned - and this is why you should never rely on photos or a static hoof as a way of assessing hoof health!
These ARE nice feet - but Eager has an imbalance which means she is landing only fractionally and intermittently heel first (when she should be definitively heel first with a good palmar hoof like this) and she is landing on the lateral heel which means she is unevenly stressing the hoof.
A lameness work up before her MRI identified a bilateral lameness which was worse (3/10) on the LF and which also affected the RH. The MRI itself showed "mild loading changes" to the navicular and pedal bones and some soft tissue damage, though this wasn't severe.
In a foot like this, which has a good baseline of strength, I would expect to see fast changes so expect more on Eager soon.
1 comment:
In this case , how would you expect the imbalance to be corrected, and indeed stay corrected.
Have there been similar problems with others?
Can we see the problem from the stance.
Is this a case where trimming will be employed to correct imbalance, or would this be too intrusive?
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